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.

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*

Prey (2022) - This was amazing!  I really liked Legion and Amber Midthunder's character. She's a badass. I also really like the Predator movies.  I think this may tie with the first one as the best.  It may even be better.  The premise is the Predator creature-thingies have been coming to Earth for hundreds of years and in this one Comanche Nation people have to deal with it, as well as the invading white people. Naru (Amber) takes it and them on and, unsurprisingly, kicks ass.

Studio 666 (2022) - This was a silly horror film, which I highly recommend, carried mostly on the charm of all the members of the Foo Fighters.  The band needs to find an awesome recording location for their 10th album, and get sent to a mansion where murders took place in the 90s.  I think my favorite goofball besides Dave Grohl was Pat Smear.  He looked like he was trying not to laugh the entire time, and every line he delivered made me giggle.  It was also a bittersweet watch, RIP Taylor Hawkins.

Spider-Man: No Way Home (2021) - A bit darker than the previous Tom Holland Spider-Mans, but still charming and hilarious in bits. I really like the chemistry between the three leads.

Thor: Love and Thunder (2022) - The only reason I saw this was because I needed to be somewhere with air conditioning.  It was a fun movie. Christian Bale's villain was surprisingly uneven.  The goats made me laugh Every. Single. Time. they were on screen.  Highly recommend for escaping the weather for 2 hours, or whatever else you have going on.

North by Northwest (1959) - I couldn't believe I hadn't seen this movie, and only realized I hadn't seen it after watching a youtube breakdown of the set by Marina Coats (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=284iZJ0zzts). I tried to watch this every evening for the past 3 nights and fell asleep every time. But that doesn't mean it's not thrilling (it just probably would have been even more if I had watched it all in one chunk).  Cary Grant stars as an ad executive who gets mistaken for a government agent by a... mobster?  Then gets tangled up with a woman played by Eva Marie Saint. He tries to clear  his name and just gets deeper into trouble. And the set design is pretty great!

I will watch anything with Sam Richardson in it, and this show upholds that statement.

A mega-music star is murdered at the afterparty for a high school reunion.  Everyone is interviewed separately by a detective (Tiffany Haddish, who is utterly fantastic here), each interview is an episode, and each episode stylistically different. For example the show is live action and one episode is animated.

(On Apple TV)

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.

I really like this show. It started out slow for me, and I had to give it a second try.  Season 3 also started out slow for me, and I was wondering during the first two eps if I was bored of it.  But then, once again, it didn't disappoint and picked back up. Saru is like, the best boss. I always find the message in this show of "why not try diplomacy and non-violence?" and how that is a viable solution, to be so comforting.

Spider-man Far From Home (2019)- I find Tom Holland's Peter Parker and Zendaya's Mary Jane to be utterly delightful.

Love and Monsters (2020) - Seven years ago an asteroid accident caused some animals to mutate and wipe out most of humanity, and now Joel wants to travel the 80 miles to see his ex-girlfriend. This was so much fun!!!  Thinking about it now, I kind of want to see it again.

Tenet (2020) - I'm still not sure what I watched, but it was really good. I always forget that Robert Pattinson can actually act. He was almost unrecognizable in this.

Freaky (2020) - A horror twist on Freaky Friday. Vince Vaughn plays a great teen girl! And the ending was very satisfying.

In Time (2011) - In the future, everyone has a clock counting down your remaining life. Unsurprisingly, the rich have a lot of hours and the poor do not. The aesthetic was great! I want at least one of the cars. And Ethan Peck was underutilized.

Big Top Pee-Wee (1988) - The second Pee-Wee film, I'm not sure what it's about other than a circus crashes into Pee-Wee's house. I saw this when it first came out. I can't remember if I liked it then, but I couldn't get through it now.

UHF (1989) - Weird Al inherits a TV station. I can't believe I hadn't seen this before. It was exactly as wacky as I wanted it to be.

Strange Days (1995) - A dystopian thriller with Ralph Fiennes and Angela Bassett that was strangely prescient for its time. It was really good.

Fanboys (2009) - A group of friends plan to break into Skywalker Ranch in 1999 in order to watch Episode I before one of them dies. I wasn't really expecting to be bored by this one, but I was.

Europa Report (2013) - A really good documentary-style story of a mission to Jupiter's moon Europa and what might be beneath the ice.

Dead Like Me: Life After Death ( 2009) - A grim reaper sets things right with her family. A nice end to the ended-too-soon show.

Safety Last (1923) - I also can't believe I hadn't seen a Harold Lloyd film before, especially the one with the iconic hanging-from-the-clock-face scene.  There were a few bits where I laughed out loud.

Free Solo (2018) - I didn't find this documentary about a guy climbing without ropes in Yosemite to be as nail-biting as everyone else who recommended it.  Maybe it's cuz I was knitting during it, or maybe I cared as much for the guy as he did the people around him.

Frozen (2013) - This was on TV, and I was taking it easy that day, so I kind of hate-watched it (I do NOT like musicals, but I heard that the costume design was amazing (It was)). I like the twist on the "true love" story.

Escape From New York (1981) - Another classic I never got around to seeing. I saw this one in an actual theater! It's got the Mad Max plot: go somewhere and come back.  And it's very, very good. And... does that tattoo go all the way down?  ; }