A month of months

Movies
Mickey 17 (2025) - A black comedy about a dystopian future (or now?) where a religious political leader sets off to a new planet to create the ideal white utopia. In order to do that, they have Mickey, who volunteered to be an expendable to escape a desperate situation, who repeatedly dies while being put into dangerous situations so no one else has to die.  He gets reprinted and his memories downloaded into the new body. It's a neat premise, but a bit heavy-handed and beats you over the head with "classism is bad". From the director of Parasite, so the classism thing wasn't surprising, but the heavy-handedness was. Based on a book, which might be a better experience.

Fly Me to the Moon (2024) - A fictionalized account of the first moon landing by the US. NASA is struggling, so the president hires a PR expert to turn it around. I thought it was very cute and entertaining, but slow in some spots.


TV
My Life is Murder S1 (2019) - Lucy Lawless, who in addition to being ridiculously watchable, plays a retired police detective who gets pulled back in to solve a mystery of the week. Comfort TV like all the other detective shows.

School Spirits S2 (2025) - Peyton List stars as Maddie, a ghost trying to solve her own disappearance.  This is so good! I can't really say anything else because spoilers. Based on a graphic novel.

Movies
The Substance (2024) - Demi Moore stars as an aging ... star... trying to hold on to her stardom and youth by whatever means necessary.  This is not something to see if you have a fear of needles. I had to look away for quite a bit of the movie and I'm nauseated just thinking about it.  Demi Moore's performance was pretty stellar and I think she should be getting an Oscar nod for it, but this was more of a (body) horror film, and those don't usually get nominated. But wow, she was good.  The desperation and depression portrayed by her eyes alone - you could see the pain of ageism and unrealistic beauty standards just eating at her.  And Dennis Quaid was great at being just SO GROSS. This movie has layers, folks.

The Wild Robot (2024) - The book was charming, the movie slightly less so.  A storm at sea causes an unboxed new robot to crash-land on an island or shore solely populated by animals. The robot's programming adapts to the animals and it rescues a gosling.

Blackcoat's Daughter (2015) - A dark, slow, atmospheric horror film taking place at an all-girl's Catholic school in upstate NY. It's over winter break, two girls are stranded, and there's a nefarious presence. Lots of blood, violence, and suggestions of violence crammed in at the end. I liked it.

Better Watch Out (2017) - A Christmas horror film.  A young woman about to leave for college takes one last babysitting job for a 12 year old boy who has a crush on her.  A home invasion starts the action and then this movie goes in a totally unexpected direction. I thought I had seen this movie when I heard the description, but it was a different film, and I figured it was a trope. It is, but not in this film! This was so good. I want a sequel. It could go in so many directions.

TV
Only Murders in the Building S3&4 (2023 & 2024) - More delightful seasons with forgettable mysteries, which I am so totally fine with.

We Are Lady Parts S2 (2024) - I wish there was more of this show!  It's a fictional story about an all-female British-Muslim punk rock band and the members' trials and tribulations, with fantastic music (including a great cover of Oops I Did It Again).  It starts with Amina having a self-declared Villain Era, and setting boundaries with her boss and standing up for herself, and I am here for it.

What We Do in the Shadows S5 (2024) - This show is getting a little silly for me, but there are still some laughs. A mockumentary about vampires living in a house and trying to be roommates for over a century on Staten Island.  I'm glad it was more Guillermo-centric, this season.

A Man on the Inside S1 (2024) - "Charles, a retired man, gets a new lease on life when he answers an ad from a private investigator and becomes a mole in a secret investigation in a nursing home." - imdb.  The first two episodes made me laugh, but there are poignant moments, too, and the rest of the episodes were a little subdued for me.

Beef (2023) - Two people get into a road rage incident and it starts to take over their whole lives.  When I first started watching this, I thought, "I thought this was supposed to be violent, but it's not and it's actually pretty funny ."  Well, that changes. Ali Wong plays a woman who has built a successful small business (still not sure what to call it - it deals with plants and it's very chic and she's part of the "brand") and Steven Yuen plays a struggling contractor. They have an altercation in a parking lot and end up chasing each other in their cars, and boy does it spiral. The ending is ambiguous (are they really dead?). Ali was so good at portraying someone who feels she has to keep everything bottled up, and it's worth watching for that alone, but I'm not sure I'd recommend it.

Wow, I have not been keeping up with what I've been watching. I thought I had posted about several of these already. And there's stuff I know I've watched since... checks entires... March.

Save Yourselves! (2020) - A neat indie film where a young couple in NYC, addicted to their phones, decides to unplug and spend a week upstate. Things don't go quite as planned when an alien invasion happens.  I liked this one a lot for how their relationship is shown, as well as the ambiguous ending.

OVNIs (UFOs) S1 (2021) - A failed rocket scientist gets put in charge of the French equivalent of SETI in the 1970s. I really enjoyed this!  The slightly kooky characters as a foil to the straight-laced scientist trying to actually run the department was perfect. And the set design and film style were so good.

Halt and Catch Fire S1 (2014 - 2017) - This is a rewatch for me, but I don't remember a whole lot, other than it was good. And how can you go wrong with casting an actor with the name Scoot McNairy? Anyway, it's a fictionalized version of the PC ... wars? of the 80s. The subsequent seasons focus more on the women, which I'm looking forward to.  Lee Pace, Mackenzie Davis, and Kerry Bishé round out the great cast.

Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (2023) - Miles undoes a "canon event" in one of the multiverses, things start collapsing, and he gets trapped in the wrong world. I was bored during this in some spots.

John Wick: Chapter 4 (2023) - I'm glad he finally gets to rest. It's hard to remember when watching these films that they take place over only a few days. It's an ass-kicking movie. Lot's of ass-kicking.

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny (2023) - This was fine. The de-aging CGI still looks really off to me. A very gruff Indiana is just retiring from his university teaching job when his estranged goddaughter shows up looking for an artifact. The Nazis are also trying to get it. We find out why he's so gruff and get an ending that made me tear up.

Asteroid City (2023) - I think this was too arty for me? It's a play within a film, set in a retro futuristic 1950s Area 51-like place in the desert. Kids are at a Stargazer conference. An alien shows up.  ???

Joy Ride (2023) - I don't enjoy gross-out humor and we walked out of this one.  I think the funniest scene was in the trailer. A Chinese adoptee with white parents travels with her best friend to China for business, and tries to track down her birth mom while there.

Mandalorian S1-2 (2019-2020) -  So cute!

Star Trek: Strange New Worlds S1-2 (2022-2023) - Or Captain Haircut, as G calls it. This is another pre-TOS franchise and is about Captain Pike (who has such great hair!) commanding the Enterprise before James Kirk.  I just really like the hope this show has.  I'm glad I had at least seen some Lower Decks so I enjoyed the crossover episode.

Resident Alien S1-2 (2021-2022) - I don't want to like this show, but I do.  Alan Tudyk plays an alien in human form who was tasked with destroying the Earth, but because he's in human form, seems to be becoming human.  He's the doctor for a small town and gets by with looking things up on YouTube, and is often foiled by children.  Tudyk makes the character mostly on the brink of likeable, and is, just often enough.

Star Trek: Lower Decks S1 (2020) - This is a funny show, but not a funny Star Trek show. It was not for me. It's an animated series about the people on the lower decks of the Enterprise. Or some other ship.

Three Thousand Years of Longing (2022) - A pragmatic woman (Tilda Swinton, yay!) and a djinn (Idris Elba, yay!) fall in love while she navigates the very tricky territory of her three wishes. It was good and thought-provoking. Directed by George Miller.

Polite Society (2023) - By the same people that brought us Lady Parts, this was a martial arts comedy about two sisters, one who wants to become a movie stuntwoman, and the other who has lost her confidence in her art and dropped out of college. They foil an evil plot.  I think the best thing about it is the scenes where the sisters are being sisters.

Barry S4 (2023) -  Dark. So dark. So good.  Sarah Goldberg, who plays Barry's girlfriend/wife, is such an amazing actress in this, especially in this season. Barry escapes from prison (of course) and is hiding out with Sally and his son in the desert. Or maybe Kansas. It had a surreal quality to it. Everyone seems harder in this season and it ends with only one person being ok, seemingly.

The Power S1 (2023) - Based on a book where women have an extra organ that gets "woken up" (maybe for evolutionary reasons) that allows them to control and use electricity.  They start feeling safe from men for the first time in... history? and the worlds reaction is very similar to the way people are trying to control women's bodies in the real world. However, characters behaving out of character in the last episode really turned me off.

Yellowjackets S1 (2021) - A plane with a high school girls soccer team crashes in the woods and they don't get rescued for a long time.  The show switches between them now and then.  But for me, it's a big "No" on the cannibalism.

The Last of Us (2023): This was my introduction to the Pedro Pascal bandwagon. I get it now.  The show is pretty good, maybe not as great for me as, apparently, a lot of other people.  The concept is: What if the same kind of fungus that invades ants and wasps and controls them, so it can propagate, jumped into humans?  It is based on a video game, and I don't play them, so it was nice to have to have someone to watch it with who was pointing out all the tropes, so I didn't get too overwhelmed.

Station Eleven (2021-2022): I read the book when it first came out, and remember bits and pieces of it, but not enough to know where the show differed, but apparently it did quite a lot.  A flu sweeps across Earth and kills most people. A young actress gets rescued by an audience member, and twenty years later, travels with a Shakespearean troupe putting on plays for survivors. There is an unhinged survivor who wants to destroy anything having to do with The Before.

I watched The Last of Us concurrently with Station Eleven and kept getting confused about which characters were in which. Station Eleven unfolded smoothly and had a nice arc. It had a good, mostly happy ending.  I liked that it hinted the post-apocalyptic world had its idyllic moments. The Last of Us was like a journey with a lot of stops along the way, and an undercurrent of fear.

Shadow and Bone S2 (2023): I read the Six of Crows duology before I even knew the Shadow & Bone trilogy existed.  Six of Crows was SO GOOD.  Shadow & Bone was fine.  I don't know if that influenced my preference for learning the Crows' fate in the show, or if it really was a more interesting story line. They have more of the 'heist' plot points. The world is similar to ours, but there is magic. A Grisha (magician) created The Fold several hundred years ago. It's a dark place with creatures that kill humans. Alina is a Grisha who can destroy The Fold and that is what she aims to do in this season.

Brazil (1985) - I finally watched this! A comedic study in bureaucracy and classism, it is peak 1985 aesthetic - that brief period of retro 40s noir influence.  "A bureaucrat in a dystopian society becomes an enemy of the state as he pursues the woman of his dreams." I saw notes of Max Headroom, Metropolis, and The Dark Crystal. It's directed by Terry Gilliam.

Punk the Capital (2019) - A documentary about the beginnings of the D.C. punk and hardcore scene. Or harDCore. Considering I hung out with people who were into punk and hardcore and lived in that area at that time, I knew nothing. Bad Brains was a D.C. band? And they basically started the whole punk movement there? Youth Brigade?  I thought they were an LA band?  Dag Nasty?!? I mean, I know I was willfully ignorant as a kid, but wow. And Dischord is DC-based.  The one thing I did recognize was the old 9:30 Club, and fondly remembered the one show I went to there before it moved. 

Happy Death Day (2017) - By the same guy who made Freaky. I really liked it. We watched this after one of my friends said she wanted something light on Thanksgiving. A groundhog day style horror film where a college girl tries to solve her own murder.

Bullet Train (2022) - Everything in this movie seemed forced. The dialog, the plot, the chemistry between characters. I usually like Brad Pitt in comedy roles, but this just fell flat for me. The plot was... assassins trying to get a case full of money on a bullet train in Japan and... ???

While You Were Sleeping (1995) - I didn't actually see this because I fell asleep 5 minutes in, and woke up as the end credits were rolling. So I was true to the title, haha *snerk*

My friend C died this morning.  She was old school and we would chat for a half hour every Saturday, me on my smart phone, she on her flip phone that she had trouble putting on speaker occasionally, right before Svengoolie and during the commercials. She was a huge horror and sci fi nerd, and had seen most every movie he showed growing up. 

Early in the pandemic, I was going out of my mind not being able to hang out with anyone, and I asked if she'd want to hang out on the phone and watch TV together.  She suggested Svengoolie, and we kept it up for just over two years. Even a couple weeks ago, when she was too weak to really talk, we chatted for a few minutes Saturday evening.

I will miss her cackling at his corny jokes, and her dark humor in general.

My favorite story she told me was from when she was working as a legal secretary in a law office.  She had the news on one morning as she was making her coffee getting ready for work, and heard her boss's name.  He had been murdered, and I believe, found in the trunk of a car.  She said in her inimitable, schadenfreude tone of voice, "Couldn't have happened to a better man."

I'm so glad I told her several times over these two years how much I appreciated her company and how much it helped me. 

It's never too early to tell people how much they mean to you.

Sandman (2022 - ) - Graphic novels are not a format that conveys information into my brain.  I remember I "read" some Firefly comics back in the day, and upon finishing, promptly forgot I had read them. I only remember this because I had been going through my day, trying to figure out what I had accomplished, realized I was missing two hours, and had to do some serious sleuthing to figure out where that two hours went.  I was so shocked when I figured it out.  I still don't know Book's story. *eyeroll* The only graphic novels I can read are by Brian K. Vaughan. If someone can explain that to me, please take a crack at it. 

So I was super-excited when I heard Sandman was going to be adapted, and that Neil was going to be involved. The visuals are stunning, and I'm so glad I was able to digest the story.

Never Have I Ever Season 3 (2020 - 2023) - Devi is still playing the harp, yay! She gets in her own way as she tries to navigate her junior year of high school.  This is sweet and funny and sad and bright and cheery. And I forgot John McEnroe is the narrator.

Locke & Key Season 3 (2020 - 2022) - I think I may have had this complaint about the previous season: The characters kept making obvious bad decisions and the "standing around talking while they should be running" got really, really frustrating. I'm kind of glad this series is over.

Our Flag Means Death (2022 - ) - The premise is a rich guy in the 1700s decides he wants to be a pirate, and buys a boat and gets a crew, who he pays wages and encourages to talk about their feelings.  The rich guy is played by Rhys Darby, who I always find hilarious, and he meets Blackbeard, played by Taika Waititi, who I really like with long hair and a beard, surprisingly, but not surprisingly. And they fall in love.

The costumes are not remotely historically accurate, but I really like them.

Stranger Things Season 4 (2022) - I fell asleep during this, and woke up to the ending where everything is wrapped up.  I didn't feel the need to go back and watch it, if that tells you anything.

Ghosts (2019) -  I enjoyed the American version, and so tried the original British version.  While I like both, I think I like the American one a little better.  A young couple inherits a country estate and through a near death experience, the woman can see all the ghosts inhabiting the house.  Hilarity ensues.

The Boys (2019 - ) - I watched this because Jensen Ackles got hired for either season 2 or 3. It's about corrupt superheroes and the people trying to stop them.  I knew going in the superheroes behaved badly, I just didn't know how badly.  It was a little much, but good.

I'm Your Man (2021) - A German film starring Dan Stevens (a British actor) as an android who moves in with a woman as an experiment so she can give feedback on how good his programming is.  It was good?  I enjoyed it?  I think I'd recommend it?

Metal Lords (2022) - This was a fun coming of age story about a kid who is obsessed with death metal and ropes his best friend, who is definitely not a metal head but does play drums in marching band, into trying to win their high school's Battle of the Bands. They try to recruit a clarinet player as their bassist.  It's a little better than the typical Netflix fare. And there are some cool cameos from metal luminaries.

Everything Everywhere All At Once (2022) - This was so good! It was surreal, funny, and heartwarming - a difficult combination to pull off, I think.  Michelle Yeoh plays a harried laundromat owner whose reality gets split into several alternate realities.  Stephanie Hsu, as her daughter, was amazing.  Ke Huy Quan (Data from the Goonies!) was also amazing as her husband. I watched an interview where he talked about not having a lot of opportunities for acting after his roles as a kid, and how he stepped back from acting, but after seeing Crazy Rich Asians, he thought there might be a place for him. Representation matters. Jamie Lee Curtis looked amazing, too.

Loving Vincent (2017) - Such a visually beautiful film!  It is an animated film, but the medium is oil paintings. Each of the 65000 frames is one painting.  Not surprisingly, it took 10 years to make.  It focuses mostly on the events surrounding his death by way of the son of a postal clerk trying to deliver Vincent's last letter to his brother Theo. It raises some questions as to whether he actually committed suicide.

Senior Year (2022) - I'm embarrassed to say I watched this.  It was so bad. Rebel Wilson plays a girl who went into a coma her senior year of high school, wakes up 20 years later, and finishes her... Senior Year.  Sam Richardson was in this, and the one scene he and Rebel are trying to be funny in, is actually funny.

The Babadook (2014) - An Australian psychological horror starring Essie Davis (of Miss Fisher Mysteries fame) as a single mother with a difficult child, who lets in the Babadook who makes her do Bad Things.  I ended up watching this during the day(s) in three shifts, because it was a little intense. No more so than other horror I like, it was just a lot right now.  It had a neat ending.

Dance Craze (1981) - Billed as a documentary about, but ended up being just concert footage of, Two-Tone era ska bands. Selecter, Bodysnatchers, The Beat, Bad Manners, etc.  It was fun to see the bands (and attempt to sing along where nothing was in any key I can hit), but the information nerd in me was a little disappointed.

Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome (1985) - In a theater! I like all the Mad Max movies and I forgot about the cow fur car. Not hide, FUR. And the costumes were sparking a bit of nostalgia for me - not that I ever wore or saw anyone wearing their like, but they just had that aesthetic.

Candyman (2021) - Beautifully shot. An excellent continuation of the story (from the 1997 film). There are so many layers looking at racism. This is one of those films that I keep thinking about for a while after I see it.

Just Like Heaven (2005) - The Marvel movies turned me on to the gem that is Mark Ruffalo. I needed something light and frothy and this fit the bill.

Free Guy (2021) - I feel like I'd seen most of the movie from the trailers, but that was ok.  But also, because of that, I had already laughed at most of the jokes.  This was definitely fun, though.

The Lost City (2022) - In the theater! I was expecting more from this based on how much I laughed at the trailer, but it was still fun. It was like a light Romancing the Stone jungle adventure.  Sandra Bullock is such a great physical comedian.  And Brad Pitt! omg.  I'd like to watch it again with subtitles - there was a lot of "two people talking over each other".

That Golden Girls Show: A Puppet Parody (2022) - Ok, not a movie, but certainly worth a mention.  Puppeteers control and voice torso puppets of the 4 fabulous ladies of Miami and reenact a couple episodes. The puppeteers are acting along with the puppets, but are in all black, so not the focus, but still added a lot to the show.  It was utterly delightful.  The voices they did were great. The woman that did Blanche/Rue McClanahan was spot on, and so was the man who played Dorothy/Bea Arthur.