Saturday Morning Brain Drain [2/3/24]

2/3/24 Elliecoo 43
Image via Amazon

What I Watched:  The Hazbin Hotel cartoon season one.

It is a cartoon trying to be edgy with copious use of filthy words . . . It’s a reverse plot where heaven is the “bad guy” and hell is the “good guy”. It is also a musical, a well-executed parody of every Broadway musical with scenery chewing. According to Mashable, “A24 brings Disney vibes, curse words, and manic musical numbers” – and A24 is a well-respected film studio. So it may be your cup of tea – it kept my interest.

Hell is Forever Sing-Along

Stayed Gone

Trailer

What I Read: The seven-book Firebrand Series by Helen Harper. The books are paranormal police procedural with vampire boyfriends, feuding werewolf packs, and anti-supe discrimination by humans. Here’s the blurb from Firebrand, book one:

Detective Constable Emma Bellamy is going to get a lot more than she bargained for when she receives her first posting to Supernatural Squad. A werewolf killer. A paranormal murder. How many times can Emma Bellamy cheat death? Brutally murdered by an unknown assailant, Emma wakes up 12 hours later in the morgue – very much alive. She doesn’t know how or why it happened, or who killed her, but they might try again.

What I Listened To: Baby Dave, new to me, excellent sense of humor. Dank Mocha; Telephobia ft. Kate Nash; and Creepy Uber Eats Man. These may be @Farscythe catnip.

Thank you for playing Brain Drain! How are you, dearest ones? Darling DeadSplinterites, what’s going on? Please do share with us!

avataravataravataravataravataravataravataravataravatar
About Elliecoo 592 Articles
Four dogs, one partner. The dogs win.

43 Comments

  1. I saw BlackBerry, which is a pretty entertaining dramatized history of the rise and fall of the phone company.

    I’d say it’s better on the rise part than the fall, because the scope of Research In Motion when it came down is harder to capture onscreen than when it was a little startup. But stays interesting along the way.

    Glenn Howerton from It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia plays co-ceo Jim Balsillie like a humorless version of his sitcom character and does a great job, although it’s hard to stop thinking of him in that role.

    One thing I think it could have spent more time on is phone culture, and why people love them in a way they don’t care about laptops or other common pieces of tech. There’s mention of the crackberry phenomenon, but it could have been a bigger piece in my opinion.

    • Just to add: I loved my crackberry. Loved, loved, loved it. A long time ago, this might have even been before the rollout of the iPhone, I went to a talk about “designing for digital.” One of the speakers (she was from the “New York Times” digital lab, or ideas lab, or whatever) explained that we have close and strong attachments to our phones because we hold them. All the other electronics, we type away, who cares, they might as well be Underwood typewriters from the 1920s. But with a phone, it’s in your hand, it goes with you everywhere, you hold it up to your face, to your mouth. I thought that was very incisive.

      • There’s one good scene which shows the way BlackBerry was a big step up on pure tactile level, but I think it could have done more to show why using an iPhone was so much more engaging down the line.

    • Phone culture is something of which I was late to the party. Although I had an early shoebox-sized phone for the car in case of emergency, I didn’t really join the in-crowd until I got my latest phone, a year or so ago. I now “get it”.

  2. …quite enjoyed what I’ve seen of the hazbin hotel thing, too

    …also…missed the free for all really…but the costner western-saga thing will probably be quite good…& I’d probably like it a lot better if they ditched the whole tone implied by the score…& had it nearer to something you might find on a page with a name like zane grey on the front

    …clearly I will be watching the deadpool thing…but I don’t hardly know how to even talk about deadpool without being scared I’ll wind up hitting spoilers I didn’t know were?

    …think it’s reasonably safe to say that in a spread that covers “deadpool *kills* the marvel universe” (…this may have more than one of example) to “deadpool *saves* the marvel universe”…the part of his schtick that breaks the 4th wall meant that until she-hulk got in on that game he was the only character (more or less) who might talk about marvel in the brand/publisher sense…& the flip-flops between being a hero…a villain…a villain who thinks he’s a hero…a hero who thinks he’s a villain…a guy who doesn’t know what’s going on or why so many people want to kill him so much…&…a guy who’s less an unreliable narrator than unsure if he can actually rely on his perception of reality to have more than a passing resemblance

    …it might not work for everyone but I always seem to enjoy it…even when him being completely justified on everything he says from a genre-aware reader’s perspective…& is therefore demonstrably delusional within the narrative context

    …so I’m looking forward to that…but until I saw it yesterday I wouldn’t have imagined quite as many workable parallels between talking about that in the abstract & trying to explain what I liked so much about american fiction

    …which is excellent & I thoroughly recommend to any & everybody

    …also…there was a trailer in that showing for a “civil war” (not that one – the one we keep talking about having sometime now-ish) in which nick offerman seems to be the president of whichever bit still looks like the federal government…that looked pretty good

    …ummm…down to my last murderbot book so that’s another re-read that’s about run its course & I’m wondering what to fill that gap with

    …disney seems to be putting out a new version of the james clavell shogun books…dimly recall there was a miniseries back in the day but they might be a better version of “dances with swords” than the tom cruise movie a friend calls that

    …& something that makes it free to me on amazon prime has a tv show that’s like a prequel for the movie sexy beast

    …that seems good so far

    …I did remember to shout out the house of ninjas last week, didn’t I?

    …think I did…but that one’s great if you like that sort of thing so it’s worth repeating?

    • Unrelated replies: American Fiction looks very good. Is that what you saw in theater? I thought that Hazbin Hotel would appeal to you and to @HammerZeitgeist. My father adored Zane Grey books; he lived long enough to have an early kindle, where he could enlarge the type to still read. Have you watched any of the new Shogun?

      • …yes…I saw it the proper way & didn’t bootleg anything…went with some folks for a birthday of someone’s

        …remember talking to some people about the book it’s drawn from when that came out but never got around to reading that…so might think about that at some point

        …haven’t watched any of the new shogun…yet…whether I do before at least a couple of people who are liable to tell me what they think of it will remain to be seen

        …think I saw most or all of old mini-series & read a book or three way back in the day

        …looks good…has disney money behind it & some great casting for several of the roles

        …so I will be sooner or later

      • Hazbin Hotel haz been on my list. Thanks for the nudge!

        Shogun looks beautiful but I wish no Europeans were centered in it. I’m still mad about Marco Polo being the titular character when it should have been Genghis Khan. That show would have been better without MP being the love interest of the princess.

        • …massively agree but my recollection of the shogun books is why I had it pegged in my head as up there with american samurai or whatever it was called that way

          …personally I don’t see why they couldn’t have altered that element to just lift the the thing a bit…it sort of matters the protagonist is a foreigner so they can hang lots of exposition on their learning curve…but there’s more than one sort of those so it needn’t have been a full overhaul…just some tweaking?

          …case in point…my favorite thing to come out of that marco polo was the standalone thing about the blind master…thousand eyes, I want to say they call him?

          • One Hundred Eyes. I don’t think I actually watched it. Adding it to my list!

  3. Watched:  The Game Show Show, a quick, four episode mini-series about the history and phenomenon of TV game shows.  It was entertaining and had some interesting tidbits.

     

    • Is there any game show better than Jeopardy? Although What’s My Line (hello, Kitty Carlisle) and old Hollywood Squares (hello Paul Lynde) were fun, iirc.

    • The movie Quiz Show that Robert Redford directed about the fixing scandal of the 50s is really good if you haven’t seen it.

    • The F1 boss has that smarmy vibe, but European mortality differs from that of puritanical USA. A dear friend was married to a French semi-pro soccer player turned semi-pro and amateur coach in the states. He was absolutely dumbfounded that she would divorce him over infidelity; his opinion was that he married her, as his wife she was most important, and their marriage had nothing to do with his affair(s). She disagreed.

      • Oh, the infidelity, I don’t care (as long as BH is not the one doing the infideliting.) Geri Halliwell was Ginger Spice and was dating Robbie Williams. Why did no one alert me to the fact that she ran off to marry the guy who’s the head of F1? I need to keep up here, and there are only so many tabloids I can read in a day.

        • I had no idea she married him either! Not that I know who he is other than probably a mega billionaire.

          Lol to the typo @elliecoo mortality could be in play.

          I’m always surprised about the way in which people give a shit about cheating scandals. I enjoy the scandals from an entertainment perspective (yes I am morally flawed) but I don’t clutch my pearls.

          Also, it’s not a cheating scandal rather sexual harassment no?

          • Ha! I didn’t notice the typo; you are right, mortality could be involved!  I am quite of the school of “whatever works for you” regarding morality.

          • actually…he only has a net worth of around 50 mil (peanuts really) being that hes the team principal of red bull and doesnt really have anything to do with the parent company beyond that

            i also suspect hes gonna be sleeping on the couch for a while despite the hand holding in public

             

    • Red Bull as a company amazes me. For years, my mom used to import ginseng drinks/syrup and distribute them to Asian grocery stores. The bottles literally had a red bull as the logo. When all of a sudden “Red Bull gives you wings” was everywhere and her suppliers cut her off because the product/production became monopolized.

  5. Saw Gran Torino. It was made in 2009, but I didn’t get around to seeing it till now.

    Things I liked

    1. I’m glad that Asian actors got a chance to act and they did a good job

    2. Eastwood showed some empathy for working class folks of a different race. We’re all the same despite our different cultures.

    3. Grouchy white guy culture. I grew up in rural Ontario where we all took shots at each other as part of the standard greeting so it felt like a part of the home I didn’t know I missed. I was accepted when they started making fun of me (stupid I know, but acceptance is a weird drug.)

    Things I didn’t like

    1. White guy saves the Asian people? I know it’s the plot, but I get annoyed about that.

    2. The plot was the typical NRA member’s wet dream, but probably not the way it ended.

    3. That sure escalated quickly… I think Gran Torino would have been better told as a mini series rather than a two hour movie.

    4. He shits on his kids (I don’t get this younger generation blah blah etc etc) then mentions how he couldn’t relate to them either which says something about him being a shitty dad. Maybe that was the point (the generation divide wouldn’t be bad if we olds took an interest in our kids instead of being haunted by our pasts…) if so it would be lost on most of the audience. I’ll admit that I look at the younger generation and roll my eyes sometimes, but I know that my dad did that to me A LOT. I try to empathize with their (rougher) situation.

    It’s a mixed bag for me.

    • Aha! Someone else who is occasionally late in watching a very popular screen offering. Now I do not feel so lacking in popular culture relevance!

      • Yeah. It’s why I like Netflix. It allows me to watch movies I otherwise missed.

        A few days after I had my major operation in 2010, the pain doc came to my bed to ask me how I was doing. Did I have vivid dreams? Visions? Etc. I told him I dreamt I was on the planet Pandora (from Avatar) and was one of the hair raping smurf people.

        Then mentioned: “But I’ve never seen Avatar.”

        2 hours later, he shoved a bottle of oxy 40mg in my hand and got my morphine drip pulled.

    • …I like to think of it as a matched pair with harry brown?

      …so in gran torino I imagine he’s a grouchy old dirty harry

      …& harry brown is basically jack carter if that film had ended differently

      …I get the problems you have with it & I’m inclined to think you’ve got grounds…but as a compare/contrast deal both of those show a remarkable amount of progress?

      …clint also did another one where he ends up as a successful OAP/AARP pick-up driving drug mule for a cartel…forget the name but that sort of made it seem like the progress might still be in progress?

      • I’ve always liked many Eastwood films because he’s usually the outsider coming to save the workers from the big bosses. My sisters joke I’m the man with no name. Quietly going about his business till someone messes with him except I’m no homicidal maniac.

        It’s progress. I know Clint is a Repub, but he’s not a complete git about it. There are flashes of liberalism in his movies that he probably won’t admit to. Just as there are old grouchy white guy conservatism in me that shows up and I won’t admit to.

        • …pretty sure I’d disagree with the man about a few things…but he won me a fair way over with the blues piano documentary he directed (& was in) in a “scorsese presents” box-set I’m fond of

          …& the pair of films he made from different perspectives covering the assault on iwo jima were a creditable effort

          …so I’d say he has some upsides…& they mostly outnumber the other stuff for me most of the time…not always, though?

          • Yeah.

            Even Dirty Harry and Magnum Force.

            In the first, he was the run and gun one man army with a .44 magnum. In the 2nd, he took a step back and looked at how bad Dirty Harry could have been as a death squad. Especially in the catch phrases:

            “Do you feel lucky today, punk?”

            “A man’s got to know his limitations.”

            I also like that Eastwood did a wide variety of movies. The first Eastwood film I ever saw was Bronco Billy. It was offbeat, but it had its moments.

            My favorite western of all time is “The Unforgiven” a story of revenge that isn’t so clear cut, murky and pretty damned messy.

            • …also one of his best speeches?

              …not sure why I don’t seem to have a youtube clip or if daily motion embeds…but I’m pretty sure it’s this one?

  6. We finished True Detective 4 last night.  It was fine.  It didn’t seem that much different in quality from the first three seasons, which I thoroughly enjoyed.

    • I’m watching a show (the last season, natch, always late to the party) that I think you will like, but will keep mum as it will be the Brain Drain on the 16th. Stay tuned!

  8. And, you, Mattie and I can sit together and scan the gossip columns when we get our DeadSplinter cult/commune going. Inquiring minds really want to know what type of abdominal surgery Princess Kate had that has her laid up for three months . . .

  9. I recently saw this picture & thought if anyone could name everyone in this picture it would be @matthewcrawley

    • WHERE DID YOU GET THIS? Yes, I can indeed identify pretty much everyone in this photo. Growing up we watched so much TV (no money to do anything else) but then I went off to college (no TV) and Germany (the less said the better) and then I got my first job and I kind of stopped watching TV. Too many people to see, too many diners to haunt, too many dive bars to get sloppy drunk in, and I had coupled off with BH by then. And believe me, when we were à deux we had better things to do than watch TV.

    • It certainly must have been during Martin Landau and Barbara Bain’s divorce. He’s in the back row and she’s next to Gene from the Match Game.

      • Everyone is in there. Try to spot Adrienne Barbeau! Jean Stapleton in the front row standing next to Lassie. If I could get this in poster form I’d…well, it verges on those creepy downmarket dead celebs playing poker posters, so what I guess I’d do is get it in a moisture-proof frame and put it in my bathroom.

        • That was easy.

          A looking in another direction Dick Smothers

          I never realized Alan Funt could have been Tim Conway’s father.

          The woman who shot JR(??) is standing next to Gilligan.

          • Did you see Jack Lord/Steve McGarrett, top row, second from left? And the bobblehead Sally Struthers? This is a masterpiece.

    • I’m pretty sure Matthew is IN that picture.

  10. well…creepy uber eats man is definitely farscy catnip…the other two i havent worked out if i like or not yet…will have to check out some more of his stuff

    im currently reading the first book of the house witch series which is proving to be perfect bed time reading with its short little chapters in which something always happens neatly feeding my just one more chapter habit without keeping me up all night… im enjoying it so far

    and i watched F1 and honestly the christian horny stuff was the most entertaining part of the weekend as the race was painfully boring with max once again just driving away from everyone

    and listening to the anti groupies

    which i had set aside for the duan later but apparently ive changed my mind…i just dont know what to yet

    • Really glad you are liking the House Witch!

Leave a Reply