Ken and Robin Consume Media: Taylor Tomlinson, Good Fortune, The Strange Death of Alex Raymond
March 10th, 2026 | Robin
Ken and Robin Consume Media is brought to you by the discriminating and good-looking backers of the Ken and Robin Talk About Stuff Patreon. Each week we provide capsule reviews of the books, movies, TV seasons and more we cram into our hyper-analytical sensoriums. Join the Patreon to help pick the items we’ll talk about in greater depth on a little podcast segment we like to call Tell Me More.
Recommended
Causeway (Film, US, Lila Neugebauer, 2022) Injured soldier intent on a return to duty (Jennifer Lawrence) befriends a garage owner with his own penchant for trauma repression (Brian Tyree Henry.) Character drama with a keen respect for actual behavior and affecting, realistically understated performances.—RDL
Good Fortune (Film, US, Aziz Ansari, 2025) Aching to do more than prevent people who text while driving from causing accidents, a lower-ranked angel (Keanu Reeves) allows a down on his luck film editor (Aziz Ansari) to swap lives with a blithely selfish venture capitalist (Seth Rogen.) Filters the themes of 40s fantasy and 30s screwball comedy through a gentle, generous version of today’s comic sensibility.—RDL
The Strange Death of Alex Raymond (Comics, Dave Sim and Carson Grubaugh, 2021) In his comic glamourpuss, Sim taught himself photorealistic inking, and in the back pages of glamourpuss, he examined the career (and death in a 1956 car crash) of Alex Raymond, creator of Flash Gordon and paragon of the photorealist comics school. In SDOAR, Sim re-examines his examination in increasing keys of eliptony, eventually indicting Raymond’s writer (on his postwar strip Rip Kirby) Ward Greene for manipulating the occult power of “comic-art metaphysics” to control Raymond and maybe kill Margaret Mitchell and God knows what else. A riveting history of realistic comics art, a thrilling occult-conspiracy narrative, and a magisterial collapsing of the planes of comics experience, it would be a clear Pinnacle if Sim’s wrist injury had allowed him to complete it. Grubaugh essentially performs an exorcism in the last 40 pages or so, which is a great ending, but not a Pinnacle one.—KH
Taylor Tomlinson: Prodigal Daughter (Stand-up, Taylor Tomlinson, Netflix, 2026) This new Taylor Tomlinson special sees her move away from the joke-a-minute density of her earlier standup sets, toward longer bits with bigger payoffs. The material here draws heavily on Bible stories, church backgrounds, and religion in general; there’s a modicum of preaching, but the punchlines are still king: “You know what I take away from the parable of the Prodigal Son? That Jesus was an only child.”—KH
Good
Harry Price: Ghost Hunter (Television, UK, ITV, Alex Pillai, 2015) Traumatized parapsychologist Harry Price (Rafe Spall) and his loose affiliation of helpers investigates a haunting plaguing a rising politician’s wife (Zoe Boyle.) Pilot for a series that didn’t happen features a team of 30s occult investigators and uses a frequent KARTAS mentionee as its protagonist, so is relevant to our interests despite its ritual invocation of trendy cliches.—RDL
The Wrecking Crew (Film, US, Ángel Manuel Soto, 2026) Badass but estranged brothers James (Dave Bautista) and Jonny (Jason Momoa) investigate the death of their father in an apparent hit-and-run in Hawaii. Soto knew the brief—scenery, manly banter, violence, explosions—and works to it here, landing what could have been streaming slop squarely in “forgettable but enjoyable 90s action movie” territory.—KH
Not Recommended
She Rides Shotgun (Film, US, Nick Rowland, 2025) A tense ex-con (Taron Edgerton) takes his smart preteen (Ana Sophie Heger) on the lam after he is accused of murdering her mom and stepdad. Gradually and then completely abandons its strongest element, the father-daughter relationship, for routine crime drama beats.—RDL
