Elizabeth Olsen as Wanda Maximoff and Paul Bettany as Vision in Disney Plus’ WandaVision Photo: Disney+
Our weekly thought-starter asks you (and us) a simple question each week: What pop culture did you consume this weekend, and what did you think of it? If you have suggestions for AVQ&A questions, big or small, you can email them to us here.
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Finished S1 of The Witcher. I understand why the Ciri stuff is in episode 1 (to lure GOT fans) and the Yennefer stuff is in episode 8 (they needed spectacle for the finale after putting the Ciri stuff in episode 1). But the show would have been better if it were 7 episodes. The Ciri stuff from episode 1 was in episode 7 with the Geralt stuff that deals with with her and take the Geralt and Ciri stuff from episode 8 and add it on and make it a longer episode. Cut out all the Yennefer stuff from Episode 8 and start S2 with it. Also watched the first two episodes of Umbrella Academy. It’s entertaining and engaging though three things irk me. First, them bonding over the Tiffany song seems out of place since they’re born in 89. It seems like one of those things you see where the writers like it because they’re a decade older and don’t think how that reflects on the characters. Second, they totally stole using the “Constantinople” song from Bunheads. Third, they have relied too much on using pop songs to score moments without any reflection of how it serves the moment outside of “rule of cool”. Which is fine, I’m all for “rule of cool” but it’s noticeable. Will keep watching though. Because it is fun and Entertaining. Going to finish Lemony Snicket today. I think it does a very good job of streamlining the books into a serviceable and digestible TV show. It maybe makes it too clean and removes some of the mystery and themes from the books. But it’s highly watchable even with some questionable changes and casting. (Nathan Fillion and Allison Williams are supposed to be twins. Seriously.)
The soundtrack in Umbrella Academy is weird. I think someone was just going through their old music collection. fwiw, the show really hits its stride in season 2, so it’s worth sticking with 🙂
Oh don’t get me wrong I like it, so I’ll be continuing.I’ll generally take “rule of cool” aesthetic over “prestige tv” aesthetic like 9 out 10 times.I also got the TPBs of the comics on my kindle. Going to see how different that is at some point.
I honestly assumed it was related to Gerard Way’s musical tastes, since he is about 10 years older than the characters. Also, them having musical tastes that might only reflect their patriarch’s decisions to expose them seems plausible, though I guess I didn’t think about how unlikely it was he gave them access to pop music until much later.
I’ve been playing Kenshi, where you control a character or squad of characters in a post-apocalyptic world. I’m doing a good guy run – so no going round robbing everyone blind, no attacking innocent people, ect. – and I decided to have my characters start off as slaves, escape, and go round freeing as many other slaves as I can. It’s pretty fun.
Watched I’m Your Woman, and the best I can say about it is that dyed blonde, low makeup Rachel Brosnahan does bear a bit of a resemblance to Kate Winslet, which surprised me.Other than that, my concerns going in after watching the trailer and reading the AV Club review were that the movie didn’t look to do what you have to in order to make a mob wife compelling: force them to confront the life that they’ve been living. That was correct; instead, Brosnahan’s character never really has to thanks to a variety of scenes that require significant suspension of disbelief, and rather than being curious and/or carrying some guilt from the lifestyle she was provided thanks to her husband’s work, she’s more interested in uncovering his relationships. A lot of it rings hollow, especially the anxiety attacks/”I want to know what’s going on!” routine, which is ok to pull a couple of times but seems to be that character’s main way to interact with everyone. It gets to the point where one of the questions you have when watching is why doesn’t someone just kill her when she keeps doing dumb things?While we eventually find out what her husband did to prompt mob-wife-on-the-run, I do actually like that the viewer only gets second hand, vague insight into the criminal organization that we’re told is plunged into chaos by his actions. Other than that, though, while I applaud the theoretical originality of a woman-focused, feminist version of a criminal on the run movie, I just wish it was a better one.
I finished my rewatch of season two of The Legend of Korra. I think what it’s lacking is a compelling villain. Unoloq lacks any real shading. Amon at least had an illuminating backstory. I wasn’t clear on why Unoloq wanted to merge with Vatu and become the dark avatar besides that he is evil and wants power. As for what works, the animation and creature designs in the spirit world are so good they could be lifted from a Miyazaki movie. The “Beginnings” two-parter that explains where the first avatar came from is both a good story and visually stunning. I said last week that Tenzin is the show’s best character. The scenes with him and his family are all solid. The comic relief stuff with Bo Lin works for the most part.I finished Shadows Linger, book two in Glen Cook’s Black Company series. This series is more Michael Moorcock than J.R.R. Tolkien. There are no lengthy appendices or non-human races with rich histories. It’s the story of a group of mercenaries who get hired by a sorceress to fight in a war for her and realize that they don’t really care for the Lady’s goals, even if she is still marginally less evil than the forces she fights against. Cook’s writing is very to-the-point and hardboiled. It reads a little like a private eye novel in places. There is a lot of moral ambiguity and harsh truth here. We’ll see if book three is as good.I’ve been listening to some Kanye West lately. I don’t understand what goes on in that man’s head, but My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is one of my favorite albums of the last few decades.
It’s a good story, but it doesn’t quite fit in with the Avatar mythology. Hello Future Me summed it up well.
Watched Star Wars: Rise of Skywalker for the first time this weekend. Wow, it was rough. It sure did look pretty, but there’s not much else really positive to say about it. I was never a huge Star Wars fan, but this certainly doesn’t sell me on the series.
Went back to one of my favorite YouTube series, Skip Intro’s look at Copaganda. The newest is being split in two as he is looking at The Shield, which I find fascinating. I always thought that while Michael Chiklis was brilliant as Vic Mackey the character was the distillation of evil. That said, I returned then to my favorite cop show, Southland.
Every episode starts the same, we are dropped into some kind of event, usually involving the aftermath of violence, and then the image freezes and a narrator comes on. Season 5, episode 1 has this for narration:
“We hold cops to a higher standard because we give them a gun and a
badge. The only trouble with that is they’re recruited from the human
race.”Yeah. That. And Regina King, Ben McKenzie and Michael Cudlitz. The show won’t blink or turn away from the issues.
I’m thinking of the ending of The Shield these days. For trumpic reasons.Not wanting to ********SPOIL******** anything here.
Because yo know, it pertains to the *****ENDING***** so
there could be a *******SPOILER******* of sorts and
kinja doesn’t manage *******SPOILERS******* very well
hence that clumsy manual *******WAAAAARNIIIIIING********
*
*
* of a ******SPOIIIIIIILER******
*
*
* but it’s a bit like the main baddies get punished by having
* their twitter removed, not real punishments that would affect
* us, but terrible punishments from their own perspective only,
* the removal of the fuel of their lives, which is both satisfactory
* and not really, some weak justice but some justice, like trump
* certainly avoiding all charges and accountability forever, but
* still losing what matters more to his deranged ego, his platform,
* his sycophants, his dreams of dictatorial grandeur, and we will
* have to make do with that, so, his mandate’s ending will leave
* us with the same mixed, morally half-satisfied, feel as the series. So, yeah, memories of The Shield, these days.
One time, doing time…for a long time.
LOL re: spoiler alert. Well done.Really don’t know what I was hoping for at the end of The Shield. Everyone else got what was coming to them, and Mackey got… what? Not even Seinfeld walked away ffs. And really, what would have been appropriate? Buried alive, maybe? Let in an iron cage to rot, unwashed and unfed (like Iago in Welles’ Macbeth)?
THE SHIELD MAKES SOUTHLAND LOOK LIKE A SHOW ABOUT BITCHES BEING BITCHESI miss ZMF.
My internet’s out atm, so no TV for me; nor the weekly Civ game.Watched Bad Times at the El Royale, which was pretty good but didn’t blow me away. I was impressed with how well it imitated Tarantino’s style, almost to the point of pastiche. It was visually sumptuous, a coupla times I wished I was watching on bluray rather than DvD.Rolled credits on Crash 4. I still have about half the “N-verted” levels and flashback tapes left to do, but I feel fairly satisfied with what I’ve played, so I can dip back into it whenever (and there’s no way I’m getting all the gems, low-death runs on the later levels are well beyond me). I might see if I can get into the PS2 entries at some point.Played a bunch of Binding of Isaac. I beat Delirium and knocked out a few challenges; it’s starting to feel like I’ve seen everything bar a couple characters. Hopefully the next expansion’s as substantial as they’re hyping it up to be.
I don’t understand BSG. I’ve watched it years ago, and I have very vague memories of it. I remember it as a disappointing mess, the horror of improvised tv-series, writing itself into corners with zero idea where to go all while lying from the start that there’s a whole plan thought up in advance. So many random mystical cop-outs and nonsensical artificial twists. Yet, I checked out bits of first season’s episode, and there’s still something oddly gripping to it. “Oh I don’t remember,was that a bad character, oh was there sabotage ? What would happen then, what would they find out how ?” It works.Is it a series I’d recommend ? I really don’t know. I’m very torn on that one. The last seasons were such a lazy letdown after a false build-up to nothing. So many false reveals, of things that hadn’t been in the background all along (that’s what a reveal is supposed to do, make sense of previous details) but were just added and reinvented on the go. Makes the whole of it a bit of a sham. Yet, there had been thrill, pleasure, interest on the way to that. Does it get cancelled in retrospect ?Oh I feel there’s a much more general question at stake, here.
Does it get cancelled in retrospect? Oh I feel there’s a much more general question at stake, here. I can’t address the bigger question, but what I’ve found it means for rewatch is that something between 60-70% of the episodes are now skips.When you know that all the implied mystery goes precisely nowhere, the ones that don’t do much save for supporting the big arcs are nearly unwatchable nowadays. On the other hand, episodes like 33, or the Pegasus arc, or New Caprica – those are still pretty compelling TV, and for the rest there’s always fast forward for when they detour into the stuff that didn’t work out.This is, incidentally, what I suspect my strategy will be if I ever venture back into GOT in a few years. I might rewatch the relevant character arcs when/if GRRM writes more on them, but there’s zero chance I’ll spend 70+ hours of my life on the whole thing ever again.
The show works best when it’s dealing with the trauma of humanity being reduced to one ship on the run, rather than the ‘plan’ elements, I’d say.
Finsisted Season 2 of Harley Quinn, which was pretty good. Go [name of character redacted]! You’ve earned the power of self respect!I downloaded Scott Pilgrim for the Switch. Then, because my 5 year old saw me holding the remote, I didn’t get to play it so there could be Mario Party time. I assume I’m going to be mediocre or bad at Scott Pilgrim when I am finally able to play it.I watched the first two episodes of WandaVision and I don’t know what I’m rooting for. The pre-air reviews on three different websites all discussed the third episode in the abstract, and that does nothing to let me know if this is a show for me. I do know I don’t like weekly television models for consumption.I decided I would read 52 books this year, and my first three are Piers Anthony’s Apprentice Adept trilogy. They are not as good as middle school me remembers, and that’s even discounting how little time it takes before misogyny and sexual violence is thrown around in a society hypothetically designed around the assumption that medical science would make sex free.
Piers Anthony’s gender politics have always been fucked up. The first Xanth novel has a scene where the protagonist sits in on a rape trial. The judge basically says she must have wanted it or she wouldn’t have let it happen, and he agrees with it. I still read Piers Anthony sometimes because some of his ideas are good enough that I can overlook his general immaturity.
I cannot imagine going back, as an adult, to the Apprentice Adept series. It would ruin warm feelings. The game against Rifleman was a lesson young me had to learn, but now I imagine it’s incredibly hokey. If you’re interested, there a great This American Life episode that features Piers Anthony. I highly recommend it to his former fans.
Consensus seems to be that the only books of Piers Anthony that have held up are the first few of the Incantations of Immortality series. Haven’t read them or any of his other stuff in decades so only vague memories, but from what I remember I’d have probably agreed with that assessment back in the day.While I generally separate the problems of an author from their work – although in Anthony’s case that’s particularly hard to do – it’s amazing how many creeps there were writing SF/F in the 1980s and 1990s.
There is a consistent through-thread of, essentially, selling daughters to the ostensible protagonist that I hadn’t remembered before restarting the books. I definitely didn’t remember the term “rape” coming up in the first chapter, and yet, it did.Ater I hit book two, I remembered that one of the Games in one of the later books was having two contestants use two unknown serfs to try to have sex, and I’m pretty sure I can skip that. Before this, the only thing I remembered was that one of the characters apologized for being insensitive about another character coming out. I wish that was what the books were really about.
Hit up a couple of international Netflix shows.First up, Germany’s Barbarians, a fictitious account of the Battle of Teutoburg Forest. It’s…okay. There are a couple of neat touches, specifically how the Roman characters speak Latin. The performances, however are not that great (with the sole exception of Laurence Rupp who plays Arminius). I watched it with the original dialogue and it’s a problem when you can recognize bad acting in another language. Also, the climactic battle is crammed into fifteen minutes of the last episode.On the flip side, I started the Japanese show Alice in Borderland and am really enjoying it. I’m only a couple of episodes in but am digging the concepts, cast and production. What struck me with the first episode was the completely normal depiction of modern Tokyo. It seems to always be presented as an exaggerated version of itself. But here, it’s just a regular city. That is – of course – until the Game begins…My wife made my day actually wanting to watch the seminal Bruce Lee classic, Enter The Dragon. Despite the obvious 70’s porn soundtrack and horrendous fashion, the movie still holds up. The film has some surprising depth (that I’d either forgotten or missed in previous viewings), with it’s touches of Zen philosophy, sex trafficking subplot and jabs at racism. Still, we watch this to see Bruce Lee effortlessly kick ass. And I’m still amazed it how fast, limber and powerful he was. And late great co-stars Jim Kelly and John Saxon each radiate their own style 70’s cool.
Remember the Titans.This saccharine Disney sports flick has aged pretty gracefully, and with everything going on these days, watching it now makes it feel more prescient than its ever been. It’s still a family movie, so the content never gets too unsavory, and yet the Black and White relations still feel more authentic than in similar race-bonding movies. One of its most effective beats is the team coming home from camp, and even though they have changed, the community around them hasn’t. Us vs Them is too powerful and it seeps back into dividing the players. How they navigate this is so important, and even though this is a football movie, I love how it makes the issue bigger than the game.Batman: Soul of the Dragon.DC Animation hits us up with a 70s-style flick filled with kung fu, blaxploitation and spy influences of the era. Tonally it’s pretty cool. If you’re a fan of DC martial artists, some of the canon’s best fighters are here. Just don’t expect a Batman movie. This is about Richard Dragon (I remember him being a knockoff Chuck Norris, buy I guess he’s a knock off Bruce Lee now), and Batman is just a gateway character into the training. But it’s not really about Richard Dragon either because no time is spent developing him. With little focus on character, this is a very action-heavy movie with fight after fight, but I can’t say I mind. It all looks great. The end goes off the rails, but I think it’s all in keeping with dat 70s cheese.News of the World. Never thought I’d see the day. Tom Hanks finally makes a western! As far as I’m concerned, his filmography is complete now that he’s covered a movie in each of my Big Five genres. Amusingly, Hanks is still the humble, kind-hearted everyman, even in the face of a gunfight. (But he’s also got that world-wariness that comes with these more aged roles.) This film sees him as an old west traveling newsman, something of a herald, which he has to explain to everybody who asks because I guess it’s a dying trade. It’s interesting to watch. He’s charged with taking a little girl back to the only family she has left, so the movie is an escort mission, and comes with all the misunderstanding, bonding and fending off pervy cowboys that you might expect. It’s a good watch.
I binged ‘Pretend Its A City’ (only 7 half hours) and really enjoyed it. There is some filler for sure, but if you’re a fan of Fran Lebowitz and/or New York City, it’s totally worth a look.
Watched A Clockwork Orange for the first time in maybe 30 years. Even more deranged than I remember it. Brilliant in some ways — the wink-wink tongue-in-cheek tone, the comically over-exaggerated mannerisms of Alex, Deltoid, the prison guard, the writer and so on, the sly little humorous bits constantly thrown out almost under the radar, the deliberately over-the-top early 70s style and sensibility, they’re all good fun. But 30 years later, viewed well into adulthood and in the context of modern standards of acceptability, it’s deeply problematic, mainly the grotesque misogynistic sexism that pervades the movie — sexualized nude women being the dominant decor theme for most interior shots, multiple scenes of sexual assault being depicted as little more than a mischievous lark, the occasional juvenile sexual humor (the constant attempts at “edginess” and pushing boundaries get a little desperate feeling at times). A work of mad genius, but certainly not for everyone, or indeed most people.
Watched WandaVision last weekend. It’s nice to have the MCU back again.I know some folks are hating the sitcom format of the initial episodes but I’m quite fond of them, having seen reruns of Bewitched and similar series in the ‘90s and ‘00s with my dad. Totally in no rush to figure out what’s happening yet. I’m just enjoying the goofy, hilarious ride with sinister undercurrents ably led by Elizabeth Olsen, Paul Bettany, and Kathryn Hahn.
Just music this weekend but a lot of it. Scored a copy of this ditty still sealed in its original long box (!]:I’m not sure how to sum up Alec Wilder. Swing era Tortoise? Ravel by way of Raymond Scott? Addams Family parlor music? Wilder was one of those genuinely idiosyncratic musical talents who saw pop, classical and jazz as all facets of the same jewel. His tunes are airy, sophisticated and yet catchy, with the odd but brilliant use of a harpsichord instead of the piano as a key instrument. Ole Blue Eyes shepherded these recordings himself as a personal labor of love to help spread the word and Wilder thought these were some of the best renditions of his work. LOG-”LOG ET3RNAL” I’m not a big fan of ambient music but I do listen to it in the thick of the winter when it feels more appropriately atmospheric. We had flurries throughout the day and this really hit the spot. Nicely constructed and textured. https://bblisss.bandcamp.com/album/log-et3rnalThat put me in the mood for some older Tim Hecker so I popped on “Haunt Me.” I confess I went through a bit of a laptop phase in the early 2000s. Ned Rorem-”Piano Concerto No. 2″ Howard Hanson- “Symphony No. 2″ My taste used to be quite a bit edgier but lately I’ve been starving for full on unapologetic, uncomplicated glorious beauty and these two pieces really satisfy that hunger. Both are rhapsodic to the point of teetering on parody at times but never actually go over the edge and are just gorgeous. The ending of the Hanson plays over the closing moments of “Alien,” as Ripley snuggles up with Jonesy (to the never ending consternation of Jerry Goldsmith.) Made my favorite winter soup, this ridiculously easy and surprisingly delicious sweet potato and kiwi soup. The kiwi adds a nice glow. I made this for a girlfriend one bitter February night and I swear she swooned over it like a Victorian heroine. http://www.peasoupeats.com/2011/04/28/sweet-potato-and-kiwi-soup/
Unlike most, I’m actually enjoying The Watch. I’m about to go and look up that song at the end of tonight’s episode.
not a Swifty, but I sometimes listen to her stuff. she’s a bit birthday girl.
Exile from Folklore today, as a good bye to 2020 and a new, cooperative, refocused 2021.
and finished off my copy of Baron-Cohen’s Science of Evil, for my own general knowledge.
I finally got around to watching A Wilderness of Error. Which, for the record, didn’t do a damn thing to change my mind about Jeffrey MacDonald’s guilt. But then I thought it would be fun to watch the old NBC mini-series of Fatal Vision with Karl Malden and a baby Gary Cole (something something TPS reports), which I haven’t seen since I was probably 9. Someone had digitized an old VHS recording and put it on YouTube, complete with the original commercials, and those actually became more fun to watch than the movie. They were still selling Betamax in 1984! I thought the format war was over by then.Mid-price cars all looked exactly the same in the mid-’80s.Riunite on ice! Riunite so nice! (Fun fact, Riunite is still on the market, although its sales plateau’d in 1985. It has had some success in re-branding itself as a sweet varietal aimed at Millennial women.)Who thought Dom DeLuise would be a good computer spokesman and how much cocaine were they on?Advertising decided that “women in hats with face nets” was going to be universal shorthand for devastatingly high class in the mid-’80s.