What I watched: Animals Up Close, with the terminally happy Bertie Gregory. This guy really is incredibly entertaining, and knows his shit when it comes to live wildlife filmography. If you haven’t watched this or his other program, check them out. You’re welcome.
What I read: I AM, I AM, I AM. Seventeen Brushes with Death, by Maggie O’Farrell. This is a memoir told in specific events—it’s not a life story so much as it’s an “I almost died a bunch of times” story. O’Farrell is a gripping writer. One caveat I will offer here is that she’s Welsh and that seems to come out quite strongly in her prose which can be a little hard to get used to. But it’s a great book and I highly recommend it.
The Dirty Streets album Who’s Gonna Love You
OK, Deadsplinterers, hand over the recommendations and nobody gets hurt.
If you liked Seventeen Brushes With Death, have you ever read Kate Atkinson’s Life After Life? I’ve seldom been so disturbed by a novel. The same protagonist lives and suffers through a different fate, happy or sad, during every chapter.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/15790842-life-after-life
I finally finished all four seasons of Star Trek Lower Decks (spread out over several months) via Paramount+. I look forward to the final season later this year.
As I mentioned before it is the only one of the new Star Trek shows that grabbed me. Maybe because I needed a good laugh or the stories weren’t recycled plots from earlier series.
Shows that more problems come back to haunt than being solved (which was a nice admission on the limitations of episodic TV in general.)
Unlike predominantly white males who get all pissy because they aren’t the dominating class on TV anymore, the “wokeness” didn’t bother me one bit.
My continuing question is doesn’t Star Fleet have enlisted ranks? It seems it’s officers/managers from the bottom up /shudders/.
I’d put in a plug for Strange New Worlds, which is more pure fun than any live-action Star Trek show … ever.
…& I’d co-sign that in a heartbeat, too
…love that show
…it’s almost perfectly dialed in to hook me every time?
…so…not sure why I keep forgetting when saturday roller-skates into view…but one reason behind catching up with some stuff is that I saw a bunch of films in the last few weeks
…the blue beetle film is fun…DC property but more in the vein of marvel…so…similar sensibilities to ms. marvel…but latino teen protagonist & an alien superweapon symbiote à la venom?
…the retirement plan with nic cage & ron perlman…fun riff on well-trodden formula
…another perlman joint…similar formula…the baker…also decent value
…the third denzel equalizer…does what it said on the tin, as the strap line went in those ads
…same could be said for the latest chapter in the seemingly immortal fast & furious franchise
…pretty sure there some others, too…but the only other one I can remember is “sumuva hood”…which is wall-to-wall deceptively canny dialogue couched in a dumb-sounding UK slang idiom…so…pretty niche but if you can find its wavelength it punches above its weight
…& a manga for maybe-@farscythe… jujutsu kaisen…netflix was where I found it…supernatural bad guys & possessed kung fu insanity with a teen/school-kid overlap in the manga way?
*grabs popcorn* checkin out jujutsu kaisen now
huh….made it like 10 minutes into the first episode before i realized i have no subtitles….
i may understand more japanese than i think
….i now has german subtitles…..coz english wasnt an option.,,,lol
…does it offer a dub…it’s not my preferred solution but…it’s netflix…I’d almost be shocked if there isn’t an audio track that makes them sound almost american?
theres a german dub for me
anyways….matters little to me…im alergic to dubs…i can make do with german subs
*tips hat*
…you’re welcome
i watched 12 strong
its a solid war movie…i might even consider it good…tho..i think ive gotten to the point where every serious war movie looks alike to me
also re-watching the pacific…..i mean band of brothers is my favouritest series…even counting firefly….but i just cant like the pacific
not coz its not good…it is… but where bob somehow still has a positive vibe despite all the bad shit happening…. the pacific is just grim…nothing but grim
That was the theater of operations. The fighting in the Pacific was each fight got worse and worse as the US got closer to the Japanese home islands. The Japanese got more vicious and the US returned the favor.
If not for the A-bomb, the invasion of Japan would have been horrific.
Some historian called the Pacific Theatre the American version of the Eastern Front. No quarter, no mercy given.
i’ve no doubt its accurate….but it doesnt make for likeable watching
True. It’s probably why it wasn’t as well received as Band of Brothers.
I read the books the Pacific was based on. They were not easy reading.
To be fair, I don’t really like the author of the Band of Brothers (Ambrose). He spent way too much time as an apologist for the US military’s mistakes during that era. The story of Easy Company was compelling, but his later books like Citizen Soldier would make my teeth grind.
having not read any of the books
i can only comment on the vibe……and the pacific is bad juju
I knew someone who knew one of the multiple authors Ambrose plagiarized. He was evidently pretty squirrely about what he did, doing a lot of “mistakes were made” pseudo apologies.
Watched little, read much, listened somewhat . . . As usual, hoarding it for my four June BrainDrains (grumble five Saturday months grumble).
We just polished off the latest episode of “Elsbeth,” which I really enjoy. In this latest episode we go to New York Fashion Week (it’s called something else) and an Asian version of Anna Wintour shows up, as does a slimmed down version of André Leon Talley. Who I once saw speak at Symphony Space, I think it was. RIP. Shine bright like a diamond, André.
But no. I have taken a break from “Hawaii 5-0” and turned my attention to “Midsomer Murders.” This would be like explaining “Sesame Street” to a kindergartener so I’m just going to share “top-level” [ugh] learnings [ugh. Ugh ugh ugh.]
1. Midsomer is not quite as blood-drenched as Cabot Cove because it is a county, or a shire, with various towns and villages, not a small fishing village in Maine.
2. Sometimes there are references to people (suspiciously) going over to Oxford. So that’s excellent. It must abut Oxfordshire, but it’s not clear in what direction.
3. Midsomer is incredibly prosperous. The houses. The cars. There are plenty of dogs about, because it is British, and also lots of horses. One horse was actually framed for a murder but the coroner determined that…anyway, the horse got off.
It presents the Home Counties in their best light. The meadows, the rolling hills, the lack of traffic. Sunny skies, everyone lives in a house that predates the reign of Edward VII (and not in a bad way; they’re all quite spacious. Home improvement is often a motivating plot line.) I bet King Charles III is a huge fan. And Camilla. This is the world she grew up in.
I thought MM was introduced as a radio play in 1937 but it turns out that it debuted on TV in 1997, so you see a surprising number of proto-cellphones (“mobiles”) and small-monitor computers. And if you go back far enough in the series everyone is so English, or at least what non-English people think England is like. Little walkable villages, people on bikes with little headlamps cycling through pitch-dark forests. Everyone knows everyone, for good or for ill. People are constantly making deliveries but it’s not DoorDash, it’s the butcher’s boy or the milkman. So civilized.
The last episode I saw featured a stockbroker who had to explain his whereabouts. He said something like, “I went up to London [which would have been south, but that’s very English] for [some Board or charity] meeting and I stayed overnight at my club.”
I almost got an erection. But the funny thing is I have been, more than once, invited to join a club or two (one is affiliated with my university) and they’re not that expensive, but like Groucho Marx so memorably put it, “I wouldn’t join any club that would have me.”
oh totally forgot….listening to
the dutch have gone alpine mad lately and every nearby bbq party sounds like this
Oh no. You should really start compiling some kind of Dutch/German/Nordic music encyclopedia and load the whole thing onto the next freelance space-age trip. Let if crash into the moon, or Mars. Or maybe, just orbit, until it falls out of orbit and it lands on my apartment building.
lol…i can probably make the compilation at least….i have a lot of this stuff
“Ski Twist!” Yes, of course. And you just know that this was filmed in the shadow of Berchtesgaden, without irony.
So I finished X-Men ’97 and now I’m like what the fuck. The ending was good – except what the fuck happened to Wolverine and Morph???