I watched the 9-episode animated series Exploding Kittens on Netflix.
My normal habit wiith Netflix is to check Rotten Tomatoes before watching anything since you never know what you’re going to get. To my surprise, the show got good ratings, so I gave it ago, still with low expectations.
I got one-and-a-half chuckles each 30-minute episode. It’s attempts at irreverence are very tame. It’s jabs at pop and gaming culture are lame. Even so, I was mildly bemused enough to watch it all (over the course of 4 nights). How’s that for a recommendation?
Eventually (and that is a long eventually) I managed to finish The Mandalorian season 2.
Recently I have been taking it easy with regards to the FOMO related to series, movies and so on. The last two examples have been the last seasons of two series I used to binge on as soon as they released, like Cobra Kai and The Boys. Due to one leaving me a bit cold (CK) and one being so gory I cannot watch it with the kids about (TB; the girls are getting older, and by the time they have been long enough in bed that I know I will not wake them up, I am half asleep myself).
With Mando I feel a somehow similar vibe as with The Boys (without the gore). Some episodes feel a bit slow, and while it is a slow I can enjoy, I need a right frame of mind to endure it. If it is after 10 PM, that frame of mind enters a dangerous territory where I wake up in the sofa once or twice and I have to give it up. So this has lengtheneed the process somehow.
Anyway, this weekend was father’s day here in NZ, and after a nice picnic in the park with friends we came back mid afternoon; while the girls were washing my car as a treat and their mum was having a well deserved nap, I managed to finish the last three episodes of season 2, which I though were great.
Just a few comments that I will blur for spoilers:
-Bobba Fett? How? And how on Earth he gets his armour so clean for the last two episodes. I’m looking forward to his watching his own series. I knew he had one, but I was not sure if it was a prequel to the original trilogy.
-I had mixed feeling about the Luke Skywalker finale. Somehow his plough thorugh a gazillion dark troopers left me feeling a bit meh. I think the combat scenes could have been a bit better, showing a slight more of a struggle. His dad had way more presence in that corridor of Rogue One.
-Esposito is a delight. In anything he performs as.
-Pascal as well, but in a different way. With so little, he can give a lot, and it is not something I had seen him doing before.
Also managed to watch Willow on Friday night. The girls started watching it with me, but got put off with the chasing beasts (cross between hound and giant rat thingies) and left me to enjoy it by myself. I still thing the pig transformation is remarkably good. And Madmartigan armour rocks. Even with mail over his helmet.
Kind of okay if you are willing to put up with the spill over nonsense from Prometheus and Covenant and are willing to suspend your disbelief that Weyland-Yutan can find a small organic object in deep space but totally miss a larger escape pod.
Just caught a matinee of Rosmersholm at the Crow’s Theatre in Toronto.
(Link here for those curious).
Full disclosure, I consider Ben Carlson a good friend, and we saw the performance because he got me and my partner tickets.
It was phenomenal. I can still feel the performance sitting in my chest. There are a few really funny moments, but gods. Wow.
It’s been a very long time since I’ve seen a live performance, but holy hells. Ben was amazing, the rest of the cast was amazing (one of the cast was on-book because the original cast member had a death in the family, but even she was very, very good), and the play itself… gosh is it ever thoughtful.
Powerful. I told Ben I’d fire him off a message when I had recovered from the performance… I have most definitely not yet, and we saw it 4 hours ago.
Aside: why in nine hells won’t Canadians make good transit? Why did I have to spend two hours on the highway to get to Toronto (about 120km away), and then over two hours to get back!? Stop making goddamn useless highways, and just get the trains to run of time. Hell.
EDIT: Devastated. That’s how the play made me feel. It was devastating in the most artistic way possible.
I’d thought so too, but I’d then watched the scene from the film and thought “that looks exactly the same”. I just watched them side-by-side, though, and there absolutely is some editing going on. I’m slightly disappointed to realise it wasn’t just coincidentally perfect – but it’s still excellent!
Anything with Freebird in it has my approval. You just reminded me how good an action movie Top Gun: Maverick is. I want to watch it again but is not on Netflix any more, I will have to dig around…
I am still slogging through the Book of Boba Fett, for the aforementioned reasons, it has become a bit tricky to watch it (late night watch proving tricky). I am enjoying the time shifts back and forwards in the story, which I a do not tend to be a big fan of.
We also had a binge through Friday night and went through the whole of The Perfect Couple. Main bullet points for me are:
Nicole Kidman can play the same character over and over again, and I will still buy it.
Liev Schreiber should be in more stuff.
Bono’s daughter (Eve Hewson) can definitely perform. She was great in Behind her Eyes, and was really good again in this.
I hate crime because I keep finding out who is the culprit way too early. But then I struggle like hell in Escape Rooms, go figure.
We finished watching Season 4 of Umbrella Academy.
The ending felt rather sudden. Sadly. I wish there was more I’ve been enjoying the show. But this is Netflix after all. Where would we be if they ever made a show that was not cut short somehow?
In the bad old days, the alternative was for the show to go on and on forever until everyone hated it, and then finally it stopped making money even in syndication and it was allowed to die.
What’s so terrible about telling a story and then stopping when you get to the end? (The télénovela style, I think.) But no, we can’t have that.
My complaint here is as usual that they cut short some story lines that developed WITHIN that season… for no discernible reason. It felt like in the middle of making the season they decided to just make fewer episodes.
Mostly I wanted to see a bit more development on the Five and Laila return from 7 years in the subway tunnels…. It’s just wasted potential.
My wife and I watched The Last Dance, a documentary about Michael Jordan on Netflix. My best friend highly recommended it to me even though she has nothing to do with basketball, same as me. So I was curious and it is very interesting and fascinating, especially because I only knew some names from Basketball (beside Michael Jordan ofc) like Scott Pippen, Dennis Rodman, Larry Bird, Magic Johnson. It is really good.
We watched most of Tracker’s first season. A very mediocre show, I was so confused that it got a second season. Fine to watch, nothing to write home. But what do I know .
We also started watching Shrinking on AppleTV. That’s an interesting show with Jason Segel and Harrison Ford as therapists. I am not sure what to think of the show yet, it is a typical Dramedy show, some heavy stuff, some good jokes.
Some things I dislike: How therapy is portrayed (especially the way Jason Segel does it though tbf it always backfires, so that’s saying something I guess?) and an overly gay male cliche couple. It is really, really over the top, why does it always have to be like that on TV? They don’t do that with lesbians (as an example Tracker has a lesbian couple in it and they act just like “normal” people). The gays I know are not like that at all. I have to ask them if that portrayal in media is annoying for them.
And I watched on my own Baby Reindeer which a good friend recommended me. She likes shocking and horrifying real life stories, so I kinda knew what to expect. But it went to way darker places than I expected. It shows how broken a person can be. If you like stuff like that watch it but it is brutal.
Something similar though all in all pretty different because it is more about group psychology and not so much singular people, was Cult Massacre: One Day in Jonestown on Disney+. I didn’t know anything about it and the events were very surprising and shocking.
We watched the first two episodes of Agatha All Along, the Disney Marvel tv series follow up to WandaVision. Enjoying it so far. Various things are in place as the “What’s up with that?” head scratchers that will inevitably be suddenly revealed to be more than they first seemed in a couple episodes. I’m never sure if I’m supposed to be surprised by those kind of revelations or not.
.