( Movies Logged )So I finally wrote up my feelings on
The Mandalorian season 2 and... they are not happy! This show just keeps reinforcing all my negative feelings about it! And I'm pretty harsh in this so really, really feel free to not read it, I have no desire to harsh anyone's squee (or, for that matter, argue about this very much). But, you know. Here you go. Also pretty minor spoilers for a couple episodes of
Star Wars Rebels and also that thing that happens in
The Bad Batch. You know. That thing.
( Hey seriously don't read this, I woke up and I chose violence )Ironic to think though that Gina Carano could have inexplicably been Emmy-nominated right now if she'd just kept her mouth shut.
And... well we've watched a lot of other tv, including
finally catching up on
Bob's Burgers after I kind of lost it when I left for Mongolia. But briefly, some others have been:
Apple+ (thanks to my phone abruptly dying and my having to buy a new one, yay stimulus)
For All Mankind - This is a Ronald D. Moore-created show about an alternate history where the Soviet Union was the first to put a man on the Moon, reigniting the space race and resulting in considerably more investment in space exploration as a whole. It starts out a little slow, but then episode three adds a lot of women characters and we're good to go. It's not perfect, and there's a second season romance that was just... why. But it's incredibly inventive and visually gorgeous, and yes I am extremely attached to all of the Extremely Flawed RDM characters. The show builds on their relationships in interesting ways, and really makes a point of making the show character driven as much as anything else (even in tiny details – Margot always grabbing for the Tootsie Rolls when she's stressed!). It's also just interesting to see a grounded take on science fiction, based on a fictionalized NASA. That's also not uh, this is hard science fiction the characters will not matter here. I do wish the Soviet Union was depicted in a more dynamic/thorough way but. I just can't expect everything to be
The Americans, okay, I know that.
Dickinson - This was the first show I wanted to try on Apple+, and unfortunately it ended up being our only disappointment. The thing is I love the visuals and aesthetic, and am really totally here for the modern tone in a period piece. But honestly for all that it's supposed to be this Very Feminist Thing and etc., the narrative more or less just seems to ping pong around Which Guy Emily Dickinson Is Going To Be Into Now. In theory there's also a serious sapphic love story, but there's not enough of it, you could just go watch
Wild Nights with Emily and get a much more satisfying story on that count. Though I guess if this existed in the absence of that movie I might be more tolerant of it not having as much queer content as I think it should be, but. Meh, honestly, the guy love interests are just still so much the focus. There are some other fun elements, when Emily's siblings get to be just outright weird it's pretty great, but then her sister ends up in again het romances I don't care about, and her brother has to be a period-accurate Man Jerk. I guess I just wished it was more what it was nominally supposed to be about than what it actually turned out to be about.
Mythic Quest - An office sitcom about the makers of a major MMORPG game. Started it because I wanted something lighter, ended up a show where the only romance is between two women, the central relationship is an emotionally charged and intimate platonic relationship between a man and a woman (Poppy Li oh my god!!!!!), and a quarantine episode so good I actually felt angry at it for being so good. And Danny Pudi is just an outstanding sitcom villain! I'm really hoping this gets a third season.
NetflixMaster of None (season 3) – We're about halfway through this and it is a very interesting exploration of the undoing of a marriage between two Black women, but it is also
extremely depressing and so sometimes it's just. You have to be in the mood. And recently it's been hard to be in the mood for much besides old sitcoms and cartoon musicals. Mmm idk the straight up cottage living is nice though. And both Lena Waithe and Naomi Ackie are very good in it.
Young Royals - This has a title that makes it sound a lot more sexy/silly teen drama than it actually is. The basic premise is that a fictional modern Swedish prince is sent to boarding school where he falls in love with a non-boarder (aka poor) student there (who is also a guy). Rich asshole kids are definitely part of it, but their antics are relatively... realistic? One of the main characters is autistic and has ADHD and I feel like she's portrayed in a very interesting and nuanced way; the actors actually look like teenagers, down to not having airbrushed-clear skin; their interactions are generally awkward and uncertain, even the villainous schemer of the group feels like, well, a foolish rich child. There was also some really interesting use of language - obviously the primary language is Swedish, but the characters often slip into English, with side character who is an American and always speaks English while the others respond to her in Swedish, and the mother of two of the main characters always speaking Spanish with her children when they're at home. So there was a lot more to it than I would have thought from the title, and I guess as opposed to being just straight up rich kid soapy drama, the tone of the show actually felt much more sweet and genuine.
AmazonThe Underground Railroad - WE ARE GOING TO FINISH THIS OKAY WE ARE GOING TO FINISH WATCHING IT. I mean it's Barry Jenkins so that alone means it's a visual masterpiece, it's very well-rendered from the borderline magical realism of the book. Just also. Sometimes hard to step back into the difficult things. But we need to get to William Jackson Harper ahhhh.
HuluThe Handmaid's Tale - I'd watched the first two seasons of this and then stopped, and finally came back in the most recent four the season because I was very much promised that I'd finally get payoff on what I watched earlier. Which, yeah, I did, pretty much. But mostly I'd like to summarize the Waterfords' plot this season as Guy in Hot Dog Costume.
HBOMaxIn Treatment - We only watched season 4 because I wanted to see Uzo Aduba. And it was good! I don't know that I'd want to watch the previous seasons, but I think the setup of the episodes mostly being therapist-patient sessions worked really well both with the show firmly setting it in the pandemic timeline, and with the therapist being a Black woman who deals very frankly with the racial and social realities of her patients. Though I guess Black Lady Therapist is a trope in television right now, but in this case the therapist is the main character, so the patients really end up furthering her story rather than the other way around. And only one of the three patients is white. All of the patients are also very good – Anthony Ramos is honestly completely amazing and plays such a tender, complex character, Quintessa Swindell had great chemistry with Uzo Aduba in playing a character facing a complex nexus of oppression and privilege, and John Benjamin Hickley, well, was a lot of fun to watch being the jerk character he played.
Gossip Girl (the new one) - I don't have any excuse for this. I like Julien and her look and her schemes on top of schemes on top of schemes; I want the blonde girl and the pink-haired guy and the fuckboy to have a threesome; it's hilarious to me that the teacher is such a fucking psychopath and yet I'm also not invested enough to care if the show ever realizes that. The only thing I can care enough to get annoyed with is the occasional strange self-adulation the show has, okay this is not Edith Wharton or Dorothy Parker it is trash and I'm here to be a trash panda who wants to eat trash.
Disney+The Bad Batch - I mean, this show does the bare minimum work of having consistent and distinct characters with motivations, events that have consequences, and clear worldbuilding. The Bad Batch as a focus isn't what I would be most interested in for a
Star Wars story, and I don't agree with all of its choices, but it is at least
making choices. And I am genuinely really into the worldbuilding going into depicting the SW universe at this period in time, during the transition from the Republic to the Empire. I just, you know, wish it did that even more. I mostly feel it drags when, really like any SW media for me, it just becomes about making references to other properties without building anything (did I need to know the backstory of the monster Jabba the Hutt feeds his sex slaves to? not particularly). But also Hera Syndulla two-parter, Eleni Syndulla wears earrings that are big loops around her cone ears, my critical thinking skills are shutting down. I'll probably write something about that in particular later.
Those Marvel Shows – I want to write a longer review about all three of these shows together, but the gist is:
Wandavision was a gimmick tacked onto a very tired Scarlet Witch narrative;
F+WS could have been fine if it had stuck to its better narratives but instead it really jumped into things it couldn't handle, and also had really severe plotting issues including noticeable unforced errors (there's been a ticking clock this entire time AND YOU DIDN'T TELL US UNTIL NOW???); and
Loki was generally fine but I have issues with the finale.
And I've been reading a lot of books? Many books? Since I lasted posted? Something like that. And I'm too tired to talk about all of them so I guess here are a few.
The Killing Moon and
The Shadowed Sun by N.K. Jemisin – Okay the long and the short is that whatever misgivings I had, or just straight up things happening that aren't what I would have liked to have seen, the worldbuilding in this duology is so incredible that I just sort of. Let it slide. And there are very specific things where I feel like I generally have to temper my expectations, but again, worldbuilding was so amazing that it felt hard to criticize anything I would otherwise criticize.
Sister Light, Sister Dark by Jane Yolen – I'm on the second book now and already these books just need to have like... even less men, but the world is interesting and honestly most importantly, I am so extremely into the style of breaking up the narration with various alternate sources, and then academic study of these sources which devolves into male academic unsubtle sexism and historians sniping at each other.
How Much of These Hills Is Gold by C Pam Zhang – Outstanding, amazing writing and really fascinating thematic exploration of race and gender in particular.
Dune by Frank Herbert – I guess overall it's one of those things where like, I'm impressed the author created it. But everyone who has ever complained about a Mary Sue while loving Paul Atriedes owes me a personal apology. Also recently
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varadia and I were watching some youtube video and the person in it made a reference to Paul killing millions of people and I said "he didn't really kill that many people" and she said "no that's from the later books when he goes on the jihads" and I said "wait he's the emperor why does he need to do that now" and she said "no he has to because of the fremen" and I said "but the fremen just wanted water for their planet" and anyway I'm glad that the new movie I guess is changing "jihad" to "crusade." Maybe. I'm not actually sure which is less racist at this point. There was this episode of
Little Mosque on the Prairie where one of the more conservative characters was trying to figure out if "Ice-Slammers" was an offensive name for an all-Muslim curling team and that's about what I'm feeling right now.
Jailed for Freedom by Doris Stevens – This is a contemporaneous account of the imprisonment and torture of suffragettes in the years leading up to the passage of the 19th Amendment, written by Doris Stevens, one of the leading activists of the National Women's Party. The "radical" tactics the NWP suffragettes engaged in most famously included the Silent Sentinels, in which the protestors attempted to maintain a continuous guard at the White House gates holding signs calling for women's enfranchisement and pressuring Woodrow Wilson to publicly endorse a federal amendment extending the vote to women. This book is also pretty clearly a central source for the movie
Iron Jawed Angels, which used activist Alice Paul as a protagonist in its depiction of the passage of the 19th Amendment. This being the only HBO made-for-TV movie I have on dvd, it was interesting to see what was incorporated and what was left out from this book – some things like
extremely condensing the actual timeline of events, but also things like the relationships between suffragist prisoners and other prisoners, especially along racial lines. The writer was probably... relatively progressive for that time, but it was also definitely the case that the suffragists gained a lot of attention for being Nice, Upper Class White Women Who Shouldn't Be Going to Prison. The movie has a brief sequence involving Ida B. Wells, but neither really goes into the issue of racism among white suffragists. It is also really interesting to see well-known historical figures described in a time before some kind of legacy-narrative has been widely accepted about them - whether it's "Colonel Roosevelt" whom I learned from this was very supportive of enfranchising women, or director of US Food Administration Herbert Hoover who point-blank refused to meet with suffragists, but wrote to assure them that he'd totally supported votes for women all along when he later ran for president.
Veronica Mars: The Thousand-Dollar Tan Line by Rob Thomas and Jennifer Graham – After reading this, I don't know if writing can really capture everything that made
Veronica Mars entertaining – I felt more like I was missing rather than revisiting the candy-neon pinks and greens and blues of Neptune, like give me all that blue-purple girl noir again please. But the story works. And I really appreciated the closure it provided regarding one of the returning characters.
Do I do things besides watch the TV and read books? Yes I will have you know that my Sims are progressing along nicely and will soon have a fancy farming expansion pack; I play trashy games on my phone; and I'm definitely going to finish this Eirtaé fanfic even if I'm thinking things like 'I should watch
Babette's Feast(????) for research.' Or god worse
My Dinner with Andre, I'm going to be so mad if I end up watching
My Dinner with Andre especially now that I've checked and know it's readily available for me to watch.
And we have also spent non-refundable money for a vacation in December so. If Florida could by any chance get its act together a little more in the next five months that would be. nice.
