Loved The Intercept, I def didn’t catch the trees and architecture themes, but I did the bees and clothing.
Been off the forums for the most part, so, favorites watched: Mr. Robot S4 - fairly strong all the way through the end love love love all 4 seasons, visuals and audio enough to make me forgive some plot point shenanigans. Patriot S1 & S2 (Only two seasons long so doesn’t take forever to consume, on amzn) this movie is Office Space crossed with Jason Bourne crossed with Inside Llewyn Davis. I’ll watch anything creator Stephen Conrad makes, sadly Perpetual Grace LTD isn’t on the free streams yet and didn’t get renewed.
Currently Watching: Twin Peaks: the Return - I didn’t want to DL this or watch it on my small computer screen. Finally picked up Showtime to watch the wonderful Everything Everywhere all at Crotch and finally got the chance to delve into this gem, I’m 12 episodes in and the ride is still incredible, although the many brand name actors showing up pulls me out of things now and again. Thank you to bluetooth and airpods for allowing me to watch things at volume while my wife works in another room.
Physical 100 (netflix, if you like strongman stuff and crazy athleticism, this is a go)
Random Japanese sitcoms - Netflix algo has figured out I like these, I think they bring me back to childhood, I doubt I’d be enticed to watch the same content in English.
Nex to watch:
Dunkirk and Following - some Christopher Nolan films I haven’t seen yet.
I just read something, and posted it somewhere on this site, that it’s not 100% gone, just that they’re allowing the actors to take on other roles and are still open to the possibility of doing another season in a year or two.
I’m watching Mad Men again. It’s early March, 30-some degrees out there and dark. I sit in the crook of the couch with a wool blanket on my lap, second glass of wine coming to room temp on the wobbly end table to my right. My husband Ben sits to my left, legs outstretched, the dog curled in the shape of a crescent between us. . . .
As the series progresses, Don’s life is contextualized by scenes from his past. We learn that his mother, a sex worker, died during childbirth; that his father’s wife resented Don; that when Don’s father died (kicked in the face by a horse, in front of an adolescent Don), the family took up residence in a brothel, where one of the sex workers cared for Don when he got a fever—the only scene of tenderness we witness from his youth—only to crawl into bed with him afterwards and “take his cherry,” as she put it afterwards.
Don doesn’t know how to escape his past, which has become a prison of shame. His most daring attempt at creating a new life for himself—assuming the identity of his Army commander, whom he was responsible for accidentally killing in the Korean War—is another shameful secret he must continuously work to hide. Throughout the course of the show, Don remains entirely oriented toward the future, as if on the run. He gets his bed made of money, a successful career, a big house in the suburbs, a wife (or two) and kids, and is bewildered when he can’t enjoy any of it.
Later, Don buys O’Hara’s Meditations in an Emergency, the book of poetry he’s not supposed to like, and reads it. In the last episode of the season, he recites lines from a poem called “Mayakovsky.” Now I am quietly waiting for / the catastrophe of my personality / to seem beautiful again, / and interesting, and modern, he reads. Don, by reinventing himself, wants to be beautiful, interesting, and modern. But he fears he’s actually a catastrophe: a bastard, a liar, a thief—unlovable. He wants to believe he can outrun the past by forgetting it. He can’t. It haunts him to the end.
Just finished season 2 of Carnival Row, which is a show that I haven’t seen much discussion about despite the high production values and star power that Amazon poured into it.
For those unfamiliar, the show mostly takes place in a gritty city roughly equivalent to London in the late 1800’s, but the world is populated with mythical creatures like fairies, fauns, centaurs, werewolfs, etc., who are mostly refugees and second-class citizens from lands that were conquered by rival colonial (human) powers. Plenty of messages about bigotry, class warfare, etc. But despite all the fantastical creatures and magic that was featured in the show, there was one major thing that I had a lot of trouble suspending my disbelief about: the Orlando Bloom character was at the receiving end of massive beat-downs on a regular basis, often multiple times in a single episode especially in season 2, yet somehow always recovered quickly without any broken bones, lost teeth, or even major facial bruising. I don’t think that even Wolverine or Deadpool would have come out of all those beat-downs without looking at least a little worse for the wear.
Someone recommended United States of Tara, which is fun and intriguing so far. Toni Collette is amazing, as usual. I have a nagging misgiving though about how it’s handling DID. I wonder how those with the disorder, and those who’ve lived closely with such a person, would feel about it.
The Outlaws. I mentioned this before, but after finishing Season 2 I want to reiterate—this is good.
Slash/Back
“Nobody fucks with the girls from Pang” not even alien zombies from outer space. A bit unpolished, but all the more fun because of it. If you liked Attack the Block and The Thing…
Together they are the story of Officer Kevin Atwater vs the whole racist police department, which mobilizes against him after he breaks the Blue Wall of Silence
LaRoyce Hawkins doesn’t seem like a well known actor outside this one series but he really delivers in these four episodes
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