Movies

All the Bright Places – A fairly well done, teenage romantic tragedy that is mostly about mental health. It is a real downer and not really what I want right now. Elle Fanning and Justice Smith are really solid as the stars, I just didn’t like it that much. **1/2

The Coldest Game – Bill Pullman plays an alcoholic US chessmaster caught in the midst of Cold War spy stuff. He has to try to win a chess match against a Soviet master while helping a Soviet spy deliver information relating to the Cuban missile crisis. It’s mostly pretty good. **½

Emma. – read review here. ****½

The Way Back – read review here. ***1/2

Goodfellas – Yeah, this movie is just about perfect. I don’t really have anything to add to the Goodfella discussion; it’s great. *****

Tremors – Okay, this movie is much better than I remember it being. Cheap and goofy, but a lot of fun. Kevin Bacon and Fred Ward are great as an odd couple of handy men who find themselves stuck in a monster movie. It is a lot of fun. ****

Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles – I am always shocked at how well this movie holds up. It is legitimately good and the turtles still look great. I love this movie. ****

Dick Tracy – This movie is kind of all over the place. Most of the cast is in a live action cartoon, Madonna is in an erotic thriller. Most of it actually works, but it still feels kind of disjointed at times. ***

Hard to Kill – I don’t think I like Seagal and I did not really care for this at all. **

Spencer Confidential – This had all the makings of being really fun, but it kind of doesn’t work. Wahlberg and Duke are good. But they are kind of stuck in a movie that isn’t really sure what it is. Wahlberg’s character has to constantly be the best at everything and be beaten down by the world. **

Pokemon: Mewtwo Strikes Back – A cgi remake of the original Pokemon movie. It isn’t great, but it is entertaining enough. As someone who hasn’t seen the Pokemon movie since I took my little brother to the theater for his birthday, I was pleasantly surprised at how much I liked it. It is definitely nonsense, but there is something remarkably enjoyable about a video game movie that sets out to tell one story and tells it, even if it is just a small chapter of a big story. ***

Lost Girls – An incredibly well made and frustrating movie about a young woman who goes missing. It is really about the incompetence and inertia of the police who are supposed to be investigating the disappearance, but do not really care because the girl was an escort. The roadblocks that Amy Ryan’s mother continually runs into are viscerally frustrating. It makes for an amazing, difficult movie. ****1/2

A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon – This was actually a fun stop motion take on E.T., mixed with all kinds of other movies. I have not previously been much of an Aardman fan, but this was pretty delightful, even if low key. ***1/2

To All the Boys P.S. I Still Love You – A really solid teenage rom-com sequel. It really does a good job of building on the characters from the first movie, not just redoing the first movie. It actually makes the characters deeper and more well rounded. It is really good. ****

Altered Carbon Resleeved – An anime movie that takes place before the Altered Carbon show, or at least season 2, that fills in some backstory and is about some Yakuza line of succession in a world where people are functionally immortal. There is some fun to be had here, but I thought it looked ugly, which is a big problem with an animated film. **1/2

Night Hunter – A thriller starring Henry Cavill and Alexandra Daddario. It executes its formula pretty well. It isn’t going to blow anyone’s doors off, but if you want something in the vein of Silence of the Lambs, there are worse choices. **1/2

TV

Locke & Key – An adaptation of a series of comics created by Joe Hill and Gabriel Rodriguez. A trio of kids move back to their recently deceased father’s childhood home and start to find magic keys. This starts a game of cat and mouse with an evil entity that is also trying to get the keys. It is okay. Nothing special, but good enough.

The English Game – This feels like a show made only for me. It is a late 19th century period piece about the development of English football. It has a kind of upstairs/downstairs set up, contrasting the wealthy, upper class players of the established game against the lower class factory workers, with some of the factory workers even stooping to being paid to play. It isn’t the best thing ever, but presses a lot of my buttons. I loved it.

The Pale Horse – A lesser known Christie about a seemingly supernatural mystery. The show really plays up the unreliability of its protagonist. It is pretty entertaining; I don’t have much to say.

Hunters – This show goes places. I am not sure they are all good places, but they are places. Set in the late 70s, Hunters deals with a group that finds out Nazi’s relocated to the USA after WW2. Logan Lerman plays Jonah, who after the murder of his grandma falls into the orbit of Al Pacino’s Meyer and his group of Nazi hunters. The show tries to both be a mediation on how to deal with loss and grief, and a sort of exploitation movie. The two halves are never really adequately combined. It is certainly flawed, but even with all of its flaws it remains largely entertaining.

The Trials of Gabriel Fernandez – This one is a rough watch. Just the vilest of humanity on display, and the complete failure of every level of a system that is supposed to prevent things like this. It is a revealing look at personal and systemic failures, but it also simply turns the stomach.

Tiger King – I don’t have time for this. This documentary is impossibly to look away from, and just keeps getting crazier and crazier as it goes along. Judging by the internet from the last couple of days, everyone has seen it. I do have some qualms with how it treats Carol Baskin. The doc makes a convincing case that she killed her husband without any real evidence that she killed her husband. I don’t like that a bunch of internet weirdos are going to be harassing her for the rest of her life based on innuendo and the ramblings of a meth addict. Still, this is impossibly entertaining.

Castlevania S3 – I think I came to the same conclusion with each season of this show, but I do not like it all that much. It seems to revel in the parts of Castlevania story that I don’t like, or to reimagine parts I do in ways that I don’t. Each season I find that I am very much not on the same page as this series. Season 3 had a decent story with Trevor and Sypha fighting a town of cultists, but I kind of hated everything around that. I am not saying this show is bad, I am saying it is aggressively not for me.

Altered Carbon S2 – I remember really liking the first season of this, but the second season kind of lost me. It wasn’t the change from Kinnaman to Anthony Mackie as the main character. I liked Kinnaman, but Mackie is really good. There is a lot of interesting stuff in this show, but this season focuses more on a bigger plot than the first season, which started as a something of a murder mystery before morphing into something greater. The production values are still amazing, but writing does not quite work.

Sanditon – This is a show based on an unfinished Jane Austen novel. You can almost tell, sometime near the end of the first episode or beginning of the second, where the show runs out of book. It then goes in some pretty non-Austen directions. Mostly in having character be a lot more complex in terms of morality instead of just personality. (That sounds like a dig at Austen, but at the end of an Austen novel, you know who is good and who is bad) Until the last episode, it still mostly works. I think it kind of fell apart in the end; maybe setting itself up for a second season. There are some problems that seem to stem from how much it departs from Austen’s, admittedly incomplete, set up. Still, it looks good.

The Office – Trapped in my house led to me watching a lot of The Office in the background. It still sucks me in when I watch it.

Black Lightning – The third season of what has been one of the better CW superhero shows wrapped in a largely satisfactory manner. The big problem I had with the end of the season seems likely to be fixed sooner rather than later and is hopefully just a story hook for next season. This season went big. Not only did Jefferson get involved in the Arrowverse as a whole during Crisis, but it also replaced the largely street level, local conflicts with an international story with larger ramifications. In the end, I think it pulled things back together pretty well and managed to bring a sprawling story that at times seemed to get away from the writers home. I hope next season sees a refocusing on the matters that the show started with, as I liked the first two seasons better.

Star Trek: Picard – The Next Generation is the version of Star Trek that I’ve always liked best. I felt a little trepidation hearing that Patrick Stewart was coming back to star in a Picard focused tv series. I was also excited, doubly so because Michael Chabon was involved. The show is not quite the home run I wanted it to be, but it is largely very good and ultimately pretty satisfying. I think the show did itself a disservice with its central plotline, which went too big and too urgent to really let people get to, in my opinion, the parts of Star Trek, which are when the crew has a little downtime. I like to see the ship’s crew interact, and this show didn’t really get to that until about halfway, and even then only did it about half way. Still, I liked it,