Movies

Maria – Some kind of would be female led John Wick style action movie. It kind of works, but it isn’t especially good. There are some good action scenes, but it is mostly just fine. **1/2

Psychokinesis – A Korean superhero movie that is actually a lot of fun. Roon-mi runs a chicken restaurant. She is involved in a real estate dispute with some mobsters working for a big corporation. When her mother dies, her estranged father, Seok-heon, shows up. He now has superpowers. After first trying to use them for petty schemes, he uses his powers to help his daughter out. It is a solidly entertaining superhero movie. ****

The Matrix – Yup, this first one is still great. I have no interest in watching the sequels again. *****

Shanghai Fortress – This movie is shockingly dull. A science fiction action movie about an alien invasion. It also tries to be a romance, but it only kind of works. **1/2

Elisa & Marcela – The true story of the first gay marriage in Spain, kind of. The movie is not good. It is melodramatic and didactic. I didn’t like it much at all. **

Rampant – A Korean zombie movie period piece. Lot’s of political scheming over the throne and trying to use an outbreak of a zombie virus to secure power. It goes badly. This is more of an action movie than a horror movie, but it is enough of a horror movie that I mostly just wanted to shut it off. ***

Back to the Future Part 3 – I know people who are really down on this movie, and BttF2. I don’t get it. The original Back to the Future is pretty much perfect, I agree, and its sequels are not quite on its level. But both 2 and 3 are ridiculously fun in their own right. I really like the 3rd one, as it puts the setup of the series into a new genre. *****

Dragon Quest Your Story – For most of this movie’s runtime it is an enjoyable, if incredibly fast paced adaptation of one of the best video games ever made. The last fifteen minutes turn it into something else entirely. ***1/2

Iron Fists and Kung Fu Kicks – This is a documentary about the development of Hong Kong Kung Fu movies. It is kind of surface, but it is largely entertaining. It covers the genre from Bruce Lee to close to the present day, covering the ups and down of the genre and its stars. It is a solid primer for those only vaguely aware of the genre. ***1/2

The Last Thing He Wanted – Bad movies are not usually this well made. This movie got miserable reviews and for about the first hour I was somewhat baffled by that. Then it got into its second half and . . . I don’t know. This is a strange movie. Everyone involved is too good for this movie to be this disjointed. **

TV

The Spy – It is interesting to see Sacha Baron Cohen do serious work. And good work. This show is good, but not great. It slips into hagiography at times, flattening a complex historical figure into something more like a straight hero. It is alo really tense and mostly very entertaining. Cohen plays the Isreali spy Eli Cohen, who infiltrated the Syrian government in the 1960s. Knowing historically how it ends makes it hard to watch at times. He has to leave his family behind and become someone else. He gets good information from the Syrians, but eventually the net closes in on him. He can feel it closing, but he is able to be talked into keeping going for all the good information he is getting until the inevitable happens. It is really good.

The Dragon Prince S1-3 – Pretty solid cartoon from Netflix. I never really warmed to the animation style. Still, the show itself is pretty well done. I don’t have a lot to say about it. It is a well executed fantasy story that is suitably complex and original. If you can get past the animation, which I really didn’t like, it is well worth watching.

Godless – This show is amazing. Just a long, loving, beautiful deconstruction of western tropes. The town of La Belle is almost completely without men after a mine accident killed nearly all of them. In their absence, the women of the town have banded together to keep things going. Jeff Daniels plays an outlaw, Frank Griffin, who waxes on about God while committing unspeakable acts. Roy Goode, played by Jack O’Connell, was like a son to Griffin until he double crossed him and took off. He takes refuge in La Belle. Sam Waterston plays a US Marshall hunting Daniels. Things almost never play out like you would expect in this show, at least until near the end. Scoot McNairy is the sheriff of La Belle, but he almost never draws his gun, leading to him having a reputation as a coward. His widowed sister is the real leader of the town. The show lets the characters live as it builds up to the inevitable conflict between the town and Griffin’s gang. It is one of the best things I’ve seen in some time.

The Pharmacist – Another Netflix true crime series. This one is a trip, following a pharmacist as he first tries to find the person who killed his son, then as he tries to get to the bottom of the all of opioid prescriptions that are running through his pharmacy as people start dying. It is plenty entertaining, even if it doesn’t really offer anything new.

The Chilling Adventures of Sabrina Part 3 – This show is something else. I still wish they would cut each episode down by about 15 minutes. I know the 40-45 minute runtime is for airing on tv with commercials, but the full hours that a lot of this shows episodes run feel laborious. I’ve got to be honest here, I am not especially engaged with this show. It is fine; largely well made and occasionally interesting, but I am never really interested. I do appreciate how wide the show tends to go with things, with trips to hell and all kinds of wild nonsense.

Giri/Haji – This show is wild. It is nominally a cop show. Kenzo, a Japanese cop, goes to England to look for his brother Yuto, who is in the Yakuza. Kenzo has to balance his responsibility to bring in his brother, if he is indeed guilty of the crimes he is suspected of, with his duty to protect his brother. There are all kinds of complications, from British gangsters to Yuto’s relationship with a Yakuza bosses daughter to Kenzo’s crumbling marriage, to Sarah, the British cop that takes a liking to Kenzo. Not on that, but the show seems determined to change genre about 4 times an episode. It is always a crime show, but sometimes it is an action movie, sometimes a relationship drama, sometimes it is animated, sometimes an action scene plays out as an interpretive dance. It keeps the viewer off balance and consistently engaged. I really enjoyed it. I don’t know that there is much room for a follow up season, but I would definitely watch one.

Shrill S2 – Another batch of episodes here that are really pretty good. I don’t know that I am directly the audience for this, but I enjoy the show enough to stick with it for its relatively short run time.

High Fidelity – I have not read the book this is based on. I never watch the John Cusak movie. This show is fine. It feels perfectly aimed at a very specific audience and I am not that audience. The foremost reason for that is that I don’t really care about music. Rob is this insane mix of appealing and completely insufferable, a hard trick to pull off. The show is really easy to watch even if you are not particularly engaged with it.