merridia: (It's all about flow.)
Quando Omni Flunkus Moritati ([personal profile] merridia) wrote2022-11-16 04:22 pm
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Awards 2022 - Weeks 1/2

Back to the grind! The snowing is falling hard and thick, which means it somehow still isn't THAT cold out? Windy as fuck, but still pretty mild for November, all things considered. I'll take it!

Having a tough time figuring out how we're going to see all of the movies coming out this/next week around my work schedule and mom's next round of chemo (she's FINALLY feeling a lot better, so it seems like a week and a half is the recovery period for this second set of drugs). Hopefully I don't just keep watching a ton of random shorts and tv forever!

FILMS

Black Panther: Wakanda Forever (2022): SO good. They had a real uphill battle in pulling this movie off, but damn if they didn't manage it. I'm just so enamoured with the idea of taking the MCU cliché of the bad guy being a twisted version of the hero and just applying it to THE ENTIRE NATION OF WAKANDA. It's so good! Namor is so cool! LOOK AT HIS PERFECT WINGALING FEETSIES. LOOK AT THEM. The origin changeup threw me for a bit of a loop, but I dug it after a hot second, and every part of the Atlantean costume designs is just so unbelievably rad. Was able to get behind Shuri as the new Black Panther with some effort, making M'Baku king helps somewhat? Shuri already had a thing! She didn't need more things! But if they're splitting the things, the character work they did with her took care of a lot of the remaining heavy lifting for me. Still think it should have been Nakia, though! Love that Marvel's gonna put out two movies in a row with an anti-vaxxer in a titular role. Angela should get a fucking Oscar nom for this, but she won't.

noooooo don't conquer the surface world aha you're so sexy

Nadja (1994): I think I liked this, but I watched it when I was more tired than I think I've ever been in my life, so it's kinda hard to say for certain. Also when David Lynch showed up, my first thought was 'oh hey, it's my friend David', so that's kinda weird.

Weird: The Al Yankovic Story (2022): It was perfect. I can't believe Madonna would do all that, though.

SHORTS

Colivia (2010): God, it's been a while, but this is still so sweet and sad, and it really hits differently when you go in knowing that the dad is the protagonist and not the kid.

The Diary of an African Nun (1977): I know I just watched this not too long ago, but it really stuck with me!

Dustin (2020): If the rave kicks you out, just take it home with you, and maybe it'll be a good day. Very... genuine. This felt so real, both the good and bad. Lovely stuff.

Four Women (1975): Striking and primal. This got to me a LOT more than I expected it to.

Jonah (2013): Doesn't really feel like the sort of simple parable that needed to be utterly drenched in CGI, but what do I know? The garishness was part of the point, I guess. Not bad, Daniel Kaluuya carries it.

Kapaemahu (2020): MORE cultures need myths about giant non-binary healers, not fewer!

Laocoon & Sons (1975): I don't know wtf this was, but I do know that I want to live in Laura Molloy when I grow up.

Lira's Forest (2017): If all movies like this were under ten minutes long, I'd probably like them a lot more.

Les Mains négatives (1978): That's all it's really about, isn't it? We all just want to be noticed.

Monkey Love Experiments (2014): WELL THIS FUCKING RUINED ME. Just as the monkey loved the horrifying cloth mother, I loved the horrifying animated monkey and am going to insist on a happy ending in my head. He's fine in there! He's just dreaming about going to space! Which also would have probably involved a lot of torture, but he doesn't need to know that!

The People United (1985): The roughest kind of documentary has got to be the one about pressing social issues that have only gotten worse in the decades since it was made. How are we so bad at everything!

Praise House (1991): There's some really fascinating stuff in here that I would have loved to really dig into and sit with, but unfortunately the whole thing is just so unrelentingly corny and annoying that I couldn't get there.

The Sand Island Story (1981): Man it'd be cool if we all actually, like, stopped doing a colonialism at some point? Since we all agree that it's bad now, maybe we should actually knock it off at some point? I kinda wish we'd seen another point of view, here? Actually heard from the people doing the evicting and building the park, maybe? Not that I think it would have changed much.

Standing at the Scratch Line (2016): Just a gentle gut punch of sound and images. Kinda relies on you to reach for the connections it's going for, I was a little bit lost. Why did I think 'scratch line' was a synonym for welfare, though??

Swallow (1995): I know a big part of the point is how people generally don't (and certainly didn't) talk about this sort of thing, but man I wish this had directly addressed what it's about more often than it does, as opposed to constantly dancing around with all of its artsy inferences.

Sweet Ruin (2008): What could have been is always better than what is, isn't it? Except it isn't, because... it isn't. I really don't know how I feel about them actually making Technically Sweet after all these years!

Touch (2013): Really shallow, but not bad. The sex robot just wants love! :(

Yours Faithfully, Edna Welthorpe (Mrs) (2017): A delightfully quirky animated thing that really glorifies a dude who desperately needed a better fucking hobby, I mean jesus christ.

TELEVISION

Black Mirror 5x02/5x03: Smithereens was a WEIRD one in that you could pretty easily tell the exact same emotional story without any of the tech trappings, so it didn't really feel like an episode of Black Mirror? Just a short-ish mystery thriller movie set five minutes in the past instead of five minutes in the future for a change. I liked it! Probably mostly because of Andrew Scott absolutely killing it, I really don't think the story holds up on its own, but it gave me plenty to think about along the way, even if none of it was new. 'What if phones but too much hahaha' except even Chris doesn't really blame the app for his wife's death, he knows that it's his fault, but if he can shift some of that blame to Billy before the end, so much the better. The stuff about the social media company instantly having way more information about everything than the cops was effectively unnerving without ever pointing to it as some big bad scary thing, especially since they were ultimately just as clueless about what was really going on in the car and the only people who actually engage with Chris as a person instead of a series of data points are the only ones who really don't want him to die in the end. Everyone just wants answers to tough questions! And we're all still as bad as ever at finding them! So yeah, solidly weird episode. Makes up for the finale being so fucking stupid, I guess!

Bob's Burgers 9x15-9x22: Really glad I somehow still have, like, three seasons of this left to catch up on, it's just such an easy good time.

Dark Side of the Ring 1x04/1x05: Oh man, that Zac Efron A24 biopic is gonna be DEPRESSING depressing, huh??

Fuller House 5x15/5x16: I will never get over how Stephanie fucking Tanner wound up being the most normal, well-adjusted character in this entire godforsaken universe. TWO EPISODES TO GO.

The Life of Cole Radrick: RADDY DADDY!!! OH MY GOD PROTECT HIM. PROTECT THIS SMALL WRESTLE CHILD. THIS TINY DEATHMATCH INFANT. AND HIS CAT BACKPACK.

The Life of Veda Scott and Mike Bailey: It's a TLO wedding special!! This was delightful, and a nice mix of them being photogenic while having great times together and really genuine-feeling downbeat moments, like her breaking down into horrible ugly sobs because people bought them presents, or him being weird and mad about surprise airport buses. I didn't realize they'd been together all through the entire five-year stretch he wasn't allowed into the US!

Marvel Studios: Assembled 1x04-1x07: I really adore these specials, and they're a nice antidote to the general opinion that's cropped up over the last few years that these movies are all just pumped out on a content factory assembly line. The Marvel machine is definitely a well-oiled one at this point, but there's still a fuckton of actual moviemaking that goes into these things from all sorts of different quarters, even if the amount of CGI they slide over it after the fact definitely gives me 'everything is cake'' vibes. I love how much time they spent on the goddamn musical number in the Hawkeye one! Also obsessed with Sir Ben Kingsley refusing to let them change out his green Maurice pillow with a different one and gushing about the puppeteer's on-set performance. Needs more bloopies, though, for the full 'checking out the DVD extras' experience.

Marvel Studios: Legends 1x22-1x24: Black Panther prep!

Minx 1x06/1x07: The whiplash from 'the magazine release is a disaster' to 'the magazine is wildly successful' between episodes was real, but I guess that's just how the hustle goes.

Queer Eye: Brazil 1x01-1x03: Oh man, I'm only halfway through, but I do believe this one may be even better than the German one? The makeovers end up being really shockingly effective even as these five guys only ever seem to BARELY nudge these people into directions they already clearly really wanted to take themselves? The one with the widowed single dad actually made me cry!

ReBoot 1x01-3x16: So this happened over the course of just under a week after I noticed the entire series is on the Roku channel (with half the episode titles in Spanish, for some reason) and needed things to binge with my mom while she was home from work. I think I'm old enough now to confidently say that season three is one of my single favourite seasons of television ever??

Russian Doll 1x01: Finally checking this out several years late. I am intrigued!

Star Trek: Prodigy 1x12/1x13: Not gonna lie, Jason Mantzoukas voicing a teen still kinda weirds me out.

Wrestling
AEW Dark 4x47/4x48
AEW Dark: Elevation 2x47/2x48
AEW Dynamite 4x44/4x45
AEW Rampage 2x44/2x45
Before the IMPACT 2x44/2x45
IMPACT! Wrestling 19x44/19x45
NJPW on AXS 6x36/6x37
NJPW Strong 3x43/3x44
NWA Hard Times in New Orleans
NWA Powerrr 10x08/10x09
NWA USASurge 4x02
We are STARDOM!! 3x44/3x45

lol I barely slept okay back to work
whatwedo: (Default)

[personal profile] whatwedo 2022-11-17 04:53 pm (UTC)(link)
ReBoot season 3 is a masterpiece, and I will hear no comments otherwise >_>

(i have the complete series boxset like a nerd)