Horses are good company -- The Witcher

Feeling the need to zone out in front of comedies and documentaries right now; here were a few that were thought-provoking or entertaining or both.

Atsuko Okatsuka: The Intruder, wonderful stand-up special from a comedian who is popping up on my "for you" pages, and she is hilarious. Really looking forward to more from her.

Trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tBoMRo3t-Bk

I tried the first 4 episodes of Hacks, about two women working together in the field of comedy. I liked a lot of things about this, some things made me uncomfortable, I'll probably watch more of it.

Carrie Pilby, on Netflix, was unfortunately not very good. I liked that it's a coming-of-age story about a brilliant, nerdy, lonesome young woman. I did not like that she was in an abusive relationship with her teacher, and that she doesn't seem to realize that it was abusive, so that was a bummer. Her father does express concern over that but the whole thing kind of dragged the movie down.

Stay on Board: the Leo Baker story is a doc about a trans guy who is a professional skateboarder. Neat to see the board tricks in this and learn a bit about the sport. Much of the discussion in here is the Olympics: skateboarding was added to the Olympics for Tokyo, and Leo qualified but did so as part of the women's team, so he is faced with a dilemma. Honestly, really a condemnation of the strict gender roles in sports.

Short documentaries:
Zion, about a disabled wrestler.
Jon was trying to find aliens, about a quirky rural gay guy.

Strange Way of Life is a short fiction film by Pedro Almodóvar, about queer cowboys, and starring Ethan Hawke and Pedro Pascal. You'd think I would have loved it. For some reason, maybe down to my mood and high pain levels, I found it stiff and unconvincing. There was a complicated back story and too much wooden dialog.

I am curious about other people's opinions and might watch it again because it's in my areas of interest, and I felt like, surely I'm missing something here. As a vidder: it's so incredibly frustrating when the film makers cut away from gay kissing, or in this case, fade quickly to black. For an R-rated short film this showed very little that one might be able to use in vids, a pity.

I have been watching a lot of low-stakes comedy of the "structured improv" variety, including TaskMaster, After Midnight, Game Changer, other shows on the DropOut streaming service-- "Dirty Laundry" and "um actually". Very silly and cheering. These are hitting the spot lately. I listened to an interview with Sam Reich (who is the boss at DropOut) and was very impressed with him.
https://www.npr.org/2024/02/06/1197954697/game-changer-sam-reich-dropout
(audio and text available).

I watched the first two episodes of "Wheel of Time," and i like it, but the violence / gore level is a little higher than what I am wanting right now, for instance dead animals. I'll probably keep watching anyways.

My roommate and I watched the first 3 episodes of "Mr. and Mrs. Smith", a series starring Donald Glover and Maya Erskine. This show is a delightful spy / romance / action mashup, very well-made. The actors have great chemistry. The violence and gore level is again a little high for me but tolerable.

We also watched "Ava," a film I'd never heard of, starring Jessica Chastain and John Malkovich. I have a feeling very few people watched this movie, and it got negative reviews, but I enjoyed it. Ava is an assassin who has problems galore and I liked seeing her solve them with determination and violence. Even though this is about an assassin, the gore level is lower? It felt more stylized and the camera didn't linger on gross things. Also kind of movie/comic book fake, where Ava gets in these hugely physical fights and walks away with nary a scratch. Fun.

I watched about half of the most recent "Mission Impossible" movie, and I liked parts of it but overall it felt endless and exhausting so I turned it off. The car chase in Rome was fun, zany, well done, with good comic moments between Tom Cruise and Hayley Altwell. But there are these huge info-dump sections in between the action, where the characters are trying to explain the plot, perhaps to themselves because the plot makes no sense. To be clear, the plot needn't make sense in this kind of movie, people want action and gadgets, so when they kept on trying to explore an all-powerful AI and a secret key, that was exhausting. Being a vidder has changed my brain, I have a better understanding of editing and visual story telling, and the editing of this movie sucked. They kept showing the same still image while doing voice over of the mission instructions-- folks, you need to keep motion going and you can put a voice over track over literally anything. Give us some visual interest and cut the length of your film down. LITERALLY cut to the chase please.

Things I've watched recently!

Rewatches that are sadly copaganda:

Hot Fuzz. Still have nostalgic fondness for this movie because of associations with friends and with fandom, but, no longer a favorite since the cops are the good guys and are cool. Olivia Colman is in it, before she got very famous. I don't think there is a single person of color in this whole film?! I've really moved on from Hot Fuzz and probably will not re-watch.

Die Hard. A Christmas tradition for those of us who love action movies, and honestly, it's brilliantly written, acted, and directed. Does contain plenty of copaganda. Part of Bruce Willis' appeal is that he flirts with nearly everyone he meets and has the air of a self-assured bisexual babe. The set pieces are amazing. The pacing is good. Holly Gennaro (sometimes McClane) is bad ass in way that is like, this woman tells the truth and does what is right.

After John McClane uses too much explosive and blows out a whole floor of windows, one of the cops outside complains to him that his people are now covered in glass. "Glass? Who cares about glass?" McClane says in frustration.

Later, John has to crawl into a bathroom and pull a shard of glass from his foot. This is his lowest point, where he conveys a message to his wife, because he does not think he is going to survive. Who cares about glass indeed.

Will probably re-watch, as I still have a fannish interest in these characters.

The Fugitive, the 90s one with Harrison Ford. Streaming on Paramount Plus.

A fairly simple cat-and-mouse chase story, with good performances and some great cinematography. Dr. Richard Kimble rather accidentally escapes from prison and sets out to prove his innocence. The best scenes are where he decides to help patients while putting himself at risk of discovery.

Does contain copaganda, as the US Marshals are largely portrayed as competent and likeable characters. The most upsetting part concerns a house raid where they have tracked one of the other fugitives.

----
Moving on to non-copaganda, I watched The Station Agent 20 years after seeing it before, remembering little of it. I'm much more positioned to appreciate this movie this time around. What a gem.

A slow, quiet, fairly low-dialog film about 3 misfits who become friends in a small New Jersey town. Stars Peter Dinklage, Patricia Clarkson, Bobby Cannavale, Michelle Williams.

Absolutely lovely and not too long! Just 1 hour 29 minutes. Just 4 works on the Ao3, but good OT3 potential in this film.

Runaway Train, streaming free on Tubi, starring John Voigt.

I think I expected this film to be more fun-- a prison escape, a ridiculous runaway train scenario with 4 engines, the buddy potential of two escapees. But instead it goes for a serious drama about masculinity or freedom or something. There is homoeroticism but not in a fun way. There's yelling and plenty of violence and a lot of misogyny. It doesn't even end in a train crash, the crash is implied and off-screen. Not for me. I did enjoy the detail that because he knows he going to have to escape by river, in the winter, the main guy fashions a sort of wet suit by greasing his skin and putting saran wrap all over himself.

Migraining this week, but I started to feel better at about 5 pm today. Sometimes I really just have to lean into being a night person.

Watched a few documentaries, they were all somewhat enjoyable, concussion/migraine viewing.

The Alpinist. About a free-solo rock and mountain climber (meaning no ropes, no climbing partner). This guy was in it for the adventure and the extreme experiences. He died in 2018 from an avalanche. Lots of great photography in this, but obviously not recommended if you have a fear of heights.

Race to the Summit. Also about 2 free-solo rock climbers, in Switzerland. The Swiss German is sort of narrated over in English. These 2 climbers focus on speed, so they are essentially "running up a mountain". One of these climbers died from a fall and the other is still living. This is on Netflix. Seems like there is a cottage industry of documentaries around this rarefied pursuit and I've now watched a bunch of them. The people who do this, who seek out these experiences and enjoy them, seem to have unusual personalities, and it seems like that type of person would also be the space adventurer in SF and/or the scout in fantasy lands.

Eat the Rich: the Gamestop Saga. About an investment scheme adventure that happened in 2020 involving redditors. They did a nice job explaining it and finding colorful characters to make this short series interesting. There were a couple random fat-phobic shots of a stereotypical fat person sitting in front of his computer eating cheetos, which was a fly in the ointment of this otherwise decent production. This was certainly more entertaining than the film "the big short." That's a low bar though.

I read one comics memoir!

Dear Scarlet by Teresa Wong. This book is about post-partum depression and some intense shit going on.

( Read more... )

Well despite all that, it was a pretty quick read. Wong uses this simplistic art style. There is something about this technique that makes hard shit easier to read about.