Same, not a fan of his work. We will likely watch Fall of the House of Usher but I’m not in a rush to do it.
Probably checking an episode out tonight. His “horror with heart” style can be cheese, but us Americans like our cheese.
Who are people going for on this year’s Great British Bake Off (Baking Show)? I like Saku but I question how far she will make it. Dan seems like he will go far but he also has an unhinged energy that makes him heard to root for. Tasha is cool, but if I need to choose one, I’ll go with Abbi.
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For food shows, I usually just pick who I think is the cutest since I can’t taste the food. I’m most likely to smooch rugby guy and Rowan, so rooting for them. Matty’s kind of cute too.
Otherwise I like Tasha and Saku. I don’t dislike Dan so he can stay too. Abbi barely registers for me.
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So at some point in time, I will go back and watch those first two Mike Flanagan series. I remember enjoying them, but I don’t remember them looking as cheap as The Midnight Club and (the first two episodes of) The Fall of the House of Usher. I felt I could often suspend disbelief for Midnight Club because often the low quality sets and make up could be excused through the framing device. House of Usher doesn’t give your brain that excuse. The show seems to be setting up a sprawling story which might necessitate a higher budget that Flanagan just doesn’t have.
Watching this and Midnight Club back to back has really solidified for me that Flanagan is not great at getting great performances, but he sometimes lucks out with great performers. There are these very odd juxtapositions of excellent characterizations next to hogslop.
All of this adds to a certain appeal for me. The bad performances and the goofy sets are enjoyable. The whole affair feels kitschy and we’re all just having fun. The world of House of Usher is interesting, and I’m excited to see where the story goes from here. If you’ve liked his previous work, you’ll probably like this.
Quick thoughts on that second episode and voyeuristic TV
If you are gunna shoot an orgy scene, try to get a roughly equal amount of naked penises to vaginas/breasts. I mean at least relative to the number of penises and vaginas/breasts that are in the scene. When there are tons of naked ladies and basically no naked guys- like what kinda orgy is this? A bunch of naked ladies and one dude has his flaccid penis out? Look, I ain’t no orgy expert! But these sex scenes make no sense to me. If you got one guy who is willing to do the nudity, just have one lady. When there is a disparity, it feels a bit gazy IMO.
No smoke shows for me this season (so hard to be a cishet man!!!), so I’m going with a combination of food appearance and if they have interesting flavor combinations. Abbi has had strong presentation and I support her hippy flavors.
The real winner though? Prue’s necklaces 
I’ve stopped with Marvel lately but I decided to check out Loki season two since I enjoyed season one… But man is this bad. Maybe the rest of the season will pick up but these first two episodes are spinning their wheels hard. Even the charm of Owen Wilson and Ke Huy Quan can’t stop this show from being a dull convoluted mess. And the special effects heavy show does not deliver on the special effects.
I might just be done with the MCU full stop. IDK if there are any upcoming Marvel projects that I have any interest in. Shang Chi 2 maybe? We’ll see but the days of watching all of it are long gone.
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What I do is I just stop watching Disney produced shows for a lengthy period and then binge a bunch when I’m in the mood before putting them aside again. For example I’m not watching Ahsoka right now and I still haven’t watched Mando. When Andor rolls around, and if it gets me excited for some Star Wars again, I’ll resume watching Rebels and then move to Mando and Ahsoka. But I’ve had less success doing that with Marvel TV and end up just doing it with the films.
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I never watched any Matrix and to fix that, we decided to see all three in order, once per week. Last week was Matrix I and it was a fairly decent experience. Today we just saw the second and oh boy was it bad. I firmly believe they took inspiration by making a focus group of 17 year old kids and asked them what they liked about the first one the most. So many pointless fights, so many pointless chases, so much pointless action. And every non-action part (ie, the thought, so to say) was incredibly dull and uninteresting.
A fair bit of narrative dissonance as well, I believe. One of the things I liked the most about the first is how the things that you don’t know work in the story telling. The unanswered questions do not feel like plot holes but like parts of a mistery that could be whatever you want: You know you’re not watching a full-on construction of a world but a well narrated portion of it. The second movie actually answers questions that didn’t need answers in the first place.
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I’m one of the few that has enjoyed pretty much the entirety of the post-Endgame stuff…but yeah. I knew that eventually the MCU would live long enough to become the villain, but it’s still really sad seeing it happen. While I would always - always - recommend people read the comics over watching the film, I understand they are not as easily accessible so it’s such a shame to see that accessible option become sullied, and by association all those amazing characters.
Matrix I and it was a fairly decent experience.
The original Matrix is one of my favourite films Of All Time. I was probably right at the correct age to see it in theatres when it came out (late teens) but I still think it is an absolutely brilliant piece of cinema. There more you watch it the more you pick up on and realise just how clever it is, and that every single thing in there has a reason to be there. Sadly, the sequels chucked all that out the window in favour of showy special effects, which really aren’t all that good anyway.
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Lol and now Abbi is out on GBBO. I’m just gunna go for Tasha.
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I was honestly kind of surprised, but I knew really early in the episode it was them. The show’s getting too obvious with the editing. Anyways, I thought the loser was a bit boring and faded into the background.
I was hoping Rowan was gonna go (not a fan).
I did say to my wife while we were watching that a certain person was not going home because despite doing poorly in the showstopper, the music was upbeat. I prefer that to the ‘panicky commercial break over every tiny inconvenience’ that you see on other competition shows. But I agree that the star baker and the sent-home can be too obvious.
I am officially falling apart. After a family meeting, we are all extremely ill with every symptom listed under “cold” turned up to 9000 (Covid is negative). So I needed something to distract me from coughing my lungs out and clicked on the film ‘65’ on Netflix.
As it turns out, for my feverish brain, it is a decent film. The CGI is really good, maybe they could have added one or two more friendly creatures to the mix. The small cast (90% of the film is just two people on screen) and them not sharing a language was a nice twist and I would not have been able to follow long conversations and a complicated story anyway. The two leads deliver and I found the relationship they were building believable.
I am sure I missed all the plot holes (but who cares when you have dinosaurs in a creature feature with sci-fi elements) due to my situation and by the end my eyes were a little misty.
7 viruses out of 10
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Has anyone checked out the new episodes of the Simpsons? Simpsons is a favorite show for me growing up, but I haven’t watched it in about 13 years. I’ve heard murmurs that it is good again, but I haven’t checked it out yet.
The few times I check-in with the show over the years tended to result in disappointment, so I’ve basically given up on it.
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I thought The Simpsons were cancelled after season 9
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It probably should have been.
I saw Geostorm (2017).
A disaster film in which I found the disasters very boring. I don’t mind the ridiculous, unrealistic plot for good disasters that threaten people I feel a connection with, neither of which happened here. No, just because you show me a boy and his dog doesn’t make the situation any more threatening, I’m not a Pavlov’s dog.
The space station/sci-fi parts were well done and the best of the whole. The cast had little chance to show off their talents, and oh boy am I just over the “American president as hero” stuff, especially knowing which clown was president in 2017.
As a commentary on climate change and how the world needs to come together, it didn’t work either because it was so US-centric, leaving out the actual climate threat in favour of a completely made-up one.
The women’s roles also felt so wrong. On the one hand, the film tried to show strong and intelligent women, but then they were not allowed to pass the Bechdel Test, nor did they have any real role to play except to make the men look good. The nerdy girl’s role was “daughter”, the female agent’s role was “soon to be wife” and even the female head of the space station was only there to open the right door and flirt with the main character.
Verdict: Highly forgettable and I’m glad I didn’t pay to see it at the cinema. Worked still well enough to help me ignore my chesty cough.