Consortium of Seven: Year 4

        Bits and pieces...       I chanced to see that while Comicon was in play out in San Diego last week, Amazon slipped a standalone origin story for Atom Eve onto their platform, placing it just after the first season finale for Invincible , the animated series based on Walking Dead creator Robert Kirkman's superhero comic series. That was followed by the announcement that the start of season two of Invincible will be arriving November 3rd. Unfortunately, presumably with an eye on the content pipeline and another on the ongoing strike, that will just start the first half of the eight-episode season. So that fourth episode will land on the 24th, the day after Thanksgiving. Currently they haven't announced the date for when the second half of the season will begin, other than to announce it will be "in early 2024." Presumably they'll tell us by the 24th, so as to give the audience a new target date to fix on the horizon. Amazon decli...

        Man-O-man, July 21st? The summer - and the year - continues to fly.  Various matters are pressing me, so let's hit a few things fairly quickly.     This week, following a brief theatrical-only run of a single week, a science fiction comedy mystery with Blaxsploitation roots arrives on Netflix. An unlikely trio of characters, Fontaine (John Boyega), Yo-Yo (Teyonah Parris), and Slick Charles (Jaime Foxx) unearth a government conspiracy.       It's They Cloned Tyrone (2023  R  2h 2m)            I'd listened to an interview piece on NPR's Fresh Air the previous week, when it was making its theatrical review, and it sounded fun. (Here's the piece, both in text and an 8-minute sound file.)       Today sees the digital release of the Venture Bros. movie, intended to cap off the seven-season series that began with a stand-alone pilot in 2003, the...