Schitt's Creek: Season 1

This one flew way under the radar for me when it debuted in 2015. My sister absolutely loves it, and told me I had to give it a try. It's good! It isn't quite great. But it's light and easy viewing, it's available on Netflix, and it's got Eugene Levy and Catherine O'Hara - what's not to like about it? Someone somewhere on the Internet - I forget who - has called it "the funniest show you aren't watching," which, hey, could be accurate, depending on exactly what you're watching. I'll warn you - the pilot is rough, as comedy pilots so often are. If you do give this a shot, at least stick it out through the second episode. That's the one that pulled me in. Enjoy!

Stan's TV Dump: Winter 2017

Trying something new here. At its inception, this blog was fundamentally about completing unfinished business. Old games, old books, old DVDs, you name it. And I adopted (and encouraged) an attitude that boiled down to, essentially, "FINISH IT!" Shitty game? Plow through it. Bad book? Turn those pages. Boring show? Eh - just leave it on in the background and ignore it.

Even after I realized and accepted that a shitty video game isn't worth sixty hours of my life just because I once spent $50 on it - and especially if I got it for free or in a compilation or bundle or something - my "completionist" attitude persisted when it came to television shows. There's just really nothing noble or admirable about sticking with a bad TV show, or even a bad TV season, just so that my year-end list can look nice and big or something. And now that I'm all done with grad school, and now that there's more TV than ever (yeah - still living in an age of #PeakTV long after the phrase itself got old), I've freed myself up a bit to say, "no, no more, this show sucks, it is not worth my time." Likewise, shedding the completionist standpoint has allowed me to feel liberated enough to just, hey, why not, check out some random episodes of television with no intention of watching entire seasons or series.

With that in mind, I want to re-purpose my old "TV Dump" format to go from "these are a bunch of seasons of TV that I recently finished watching" to more of a "let's talk about some TV shows I watched that won't be getting full-on independent posts."

Let me define these shows into three categories: bails, fails, and tales. Yeah the last one's a bit forced but stay with me.

A bail happens when I quit on a show I've watched for a while now, mid-season. There's something cathartic (and ordinary for most people) about sitting through an episode of TV so bad or so boring that you finally throw up your hands and say, "I'm done!" I can't promise that every bail is permanent - there's always a chance a show gets better after I stop watching it, and I hear about it from critics or friends or coworkers or whatever, and I come crawling back; there's also a chance I stop devoting weekly DVR time to it, only to rediscover it in the summer on Netflix or elsewhere. A bail doesn't constitute a burnt bridge; it just means I'm not sure I care for where this bridge is heading, and I will safely and easily step off for now.

A fail is sort of like a bail, except that it has to come during a show's first season, particularly after only a few episodes. A bail says, "I used to like this show, and I no longer do, so I am done with it." A fail says "I decided to try out this show, and never liked it at all, so I am done with it." Subtle difference, but you see it, right? The thing is, I'm not going to go around checking out every new show and every pilot available to stream - a fail has to actually start with some semblance of expectations on my end. These aren't shows I knew I'd hate; these are shows I thought had a decent shot at becoming appointment viewing.

Lastly, a tale is something completely different - a stand-alone episode I took in for some reason or another, just jumping right in, with no previous knowledge of the series, or at least the season. For some shows - SNL comes to mind, as do reality shows - this is almost the natural, default way to consume episodes. For others - deeply serialized TV, for instance - it hardly makes any sense at all. This is meant more to cover the latter; I don't need to weigh in on the latest Melissa McCarthy sketch or Trevor Noah segment in order to justify watching it. But maybe there's a veteran sitcom kicking around - why not watch an episode or two? Maybe I'm at my mom's for dinner and she and my sister throw on an episode of The Bachelor - sure, why not? Think of tales as little nuggets of "investigative" TV-watching. At best, a tale might lead to some actual interest in my end, and a series binge. At worst, it's a one-off episode, a waste of an hour or less.

Okay. That all felt largely unnecessary.

BAILS:

The X-Files: Season 4

I was all set to be done with The X-Files after three seasons - it just wasn't grabbing me! Then Trev told me I had to at least check out "Home," a fourth season episode that's widely regarded as one of the best, weirdest, and most controversial X-Files episodes ever made. Luckily, "Home" was the second episode of Season 4 so I really didn't have much farther to go. (Yes, I could have skipped S4 E1, but why skip just one episode? Ugh - this is my issue, dammit.) "Home" delivered - it was weird as hell, creepy, plenty unsettling. I'm glad I saw it. But I'm also glad to make this bail "official." Looking ahead at almost 200 remaining episodes in the series for me is just harrowing. Life is too short, and there's too much better television. Bail, baby, bail!

Buffy the Vampire Slayer: Season 2

Watching the first season of this show a year and a half ago was a fun little exercise in late '90s nostalgia. The first season was also just twelve episodes long - how modern! But all of a sudden I was watching a second season of Buffy and not really loving it, staring down the barrel of twenty-odd hour-long episodes - and six seasons of them - and I realized the only reason I was still watching was out of habit and Netflix being Netflix. This was rapidly turning into The X-Files all over again - acclaimed '90s show I missed out on the first time around that just wasn't holding my interest in 2017. Bye Buffy!

FAILS:

Mariah's World

I have always, always, always had a special place in my heart for Mariah Carey - her music, yeah sure, but even more than that her mythos. There was her MTV Cribs episode, the pinnacle of Bush-era reality television. There was her infamous HSN appearance. There are dozens or maybe even hundreds of interviews and tell-alls through the years that paint her out to be not just a diva, but the living essence of a diva, this incessantly self-obsessed character whose stage persona had overtaken her own private life, who no longer lived in our shared reality but on a higher plain of existence where everything was glitter and butterflies and obnoxious luxury. So when Mariah Carey took the stage at the TCA press tour last summer on some sort of throne couch, dressed in a weird stage-friendly loungewear get-up, surrounded by shirtless men, to promote her new "docu-series," I thought, okay, yes. This is going to be that Cribs episode made into an entire series. This is going to be every decadent luxury trope, played up to eleven. How many hand massages does Mariah get in a given day? How many episodes will it take before we see her getting fanned by gigantic palm fronds while wearing sunglasses? Will she at any point sip wine out of a literal diamond goblet? What I got, instead - and shame on me for not predicting this - was a "behind the scenes" look at Mariah's life as she went on tour in Europe and prepared for her wedding. Just every shitty reality show gimmick here - played up drama between back-up dancers, her manager being "the bad guy," Mariah just "so over" all of it like the only adult in the room. What? Boo. This isn't what I wanted! This is not what I have come to expect from Mariah Carey, proud diva extraordinaire! I bailed after three episodes, just before the real Mariah I knew and loved showed up for that New Years Eve meltdown. Ha! That was as close to I got to getting what I wanted from this show.

The Mick

Kaitlin Olson deserves a mainstream hit, right? This isn't it. She's basically playing a network-friendly version of Dee Reynolds here, surrounded by less talented actors - primarily, kids. I get the idea here, but not the appeal. Aunt Mickey is suddenly put in charge of her rich sister's spoiled kids and huge house and... that's where the pitch team stopped, I guess. No one in the show is endearing enough or funny enough to sustain a sitcom. Oh well! Here's hoping this thing gets canceled after one bad season so that Kaitlin Olson can find something else to do with her time away from Always Sunny.

Emerald City

Kind of figured this would be a mess. Buzz was bad, the source material's been trampled to death at this point, and I've never been able to stick with an NBC hour-long, like, ever, actually, despite so many tries. But let me back up. This is The Wizard of Oz given the dark-n-gritty modern day twist treatment. Yeah, in hindsight, I don't know what I expected. Maybe something campy and twisted and fun? But that flies in the face of the aforementioned dark-n-gritty treatment I guess. My bad! Shouldn't have bothered. For what it's worth, I made it through two episodes here but I definitely checked out midway through the second.

Detroiters

Sam Richardson is very quietly the best part of Veep, so when I saw that he and Tim Robinson had their own show coming out on Comedy Central I got pretty excited for it. That was a mistake! This was dumb as hell right off the bat, just two overgrown dipshits getting into the same shenanigans as the boys on Workaholics and, like, Kenan & Kel. But these men are already in their thirties. There's nothing funny about completely belligerent dumbasses who reached adulthood some fifteen years ago. (Workaholics is terrible now, and has been for years. but at least when it started it was funny - Detroiters has no excuse!) I made it two or three episodes before pulling the plug - honestly can't remember - but knew I would end up doing so around twenty minutes into the dang pilot. Boo.

TALES:

Frontline S35 E2-3: "Divided States of America"

Torn here. On the one hand, I've got this newfound respect for PBS lately. Maybe that's just me getting older? Not only are they showing all kinds of documentaries, but their Frontline series seems to be the last place on television where I can get an unbiased, good story told to me about a current event. This two-parter was a doozy, four hours long in total, and meant to cover just how we collectively reached this point where we're divided as hell on everything and no longer even trusting entire news networks to report on things accurately. And I got a hell of a great documentary, alright - but not one about the growing divide in America as much as one about the eight years of the Obama administration in general. Covering the elections of 2008 and 2012 fairly extensively, along with the Tea Party movement and some of the domestic issues Obama had to respond to (economy, health care, growing emphasis on gun control, etc.), this just didn't fully paint the picture I wanted to see that would lead me to understand the "white plight" of the Midwest. There was hardly any mention here of Hillary, none of Bernie, and very little of the 2016 election cycle in general. The thesis here seemed to be "Obama oversaw a growing divide, which probably wasn't really his fault, but you can make that conclusion on your own." That's fine, and it made for a compelling current events history lesson of sorts, but it was really just an overview of national headlines over the last eight years. Where's the new insight? What caused the divide? Whatever - would watch Frontline again.

Bones S12 E5: "The Tutor in the Tussle"

Time was, House was a smash success for Fox and in its second season they developed a new hour-long medical-crime drama, Bones, to air along with it, starring a 29-year-old Emily Deschanel and a fresh-off-of-Buffy-and-Angel David Boreanaz. I watched an episode or two, back then, in 2005. Or maybe more accurately, my father did, and I was in the room too, and I didn't bother to, like, go up to my room or anything. It was "meh." Felt like a very run-of-the-mill procedural. And suddenly I blinked and twelve years later, there I was, at my dad's place after dinner, and what's on the TV? Bones! In its final season! How? Why? What business did Bones have lasting twelve seasons? I looked this up, and do you know what Fox's second-longest-tenured drama series is? It is Sleepy Hollow, which is eight years younger. But enough gawking at how mediocre Bones has been for a long time. Question is, how was it? How was Season 12 Episode 5? I assure you, it was definitively worse than "meh." This is so clearly a show where people are no longer trying to make a good show. How long it's been like that, I can't say. But at this point the show seems to exist in spite of itself, almost as if to actively make fun of itself. Self parody is one thing, but the puns in this one, the "who gives a shit" attitude from the writers to the actors. My God! I've seen what happens when good shows go bad, but is this what it looks like when bad shows are allowed to just linger around for a decade too long? Truly something to behold. This is Fox somehow stumbling backward into a CBS-style procedural and playing out the stretch. And I know I've asked how this is still on the air, but here's an equally valid question - why is this ending? It's not like either Deschanel or Boreanaz has a burgeoning career to return to - look at their respective IMDb pages over the last ten years for some truly stark and depressing shit. And against all odds this turd is still pulling in three million viewers a week. (For comparison's sake, little sister Zooey's New Girl doesn't even get more than two million anymore.) But hey, this is way more time and digital print than I ever thought I'd give Bones again after 2005. Let's move on...

Alaskan Bush People S4 E3: "Browntown Boom"

Oh hell yeah. Another thing my dad was always good for on the TV front was Discovery Channel shows about crazy people. Remember Deadliest Catch? He was all over that, and Gold Rush, and like three or four other derivatives thereof. This show... from what I could gather, this show is about an adult family living in the absolute middle of nowhere on the Alaskan coast. (Seems redundant.) They're called the Browns and they have what seems like eight children, all adults, all single, all living with them on this family compound of sorts. I give these people all the credit in the world for hammering out a living out in the middle of North Buttfuck - that's a lifestyle that would drive me crazy with panic after all of, like, two days. They're resourceful as hell, re-purposing trash from "nearby" dumps into these Gilligan's Island style doohickey contraptions that run on gasoline at, like, three percent efficiency. Real Sarah Palin salt of the earth, you know? But holy hell - let's just say there's a reason they're TV characters. Give this one a passing glance some time.

Life in Pieces S2 E12: "Best Waxing Grocery Rental"

Third of three shows I caught at my dad's - wild night, I know! This was better than I expected it to be, which I suppose isn't that hard or anything, given that it's a CBS sitcom with characters whose median age is something like 50 - a slightly older man's Modern Family, I guess. This feels like a show where, had I jumped in from the get-go, I'd be watching and enjoying it just fine, but since I didn't, there's no compelling reason to do so. I mean, none of us needs more TV to watch, right? But yeah - not bad. Certainly better than Bones and Alaskan Bush People.

Black-ish S3 E12: "Lemons"

There's always been Internet chatter about Black-ish, but this episode in particular was being billed as a "very special" post-election episode - one in which Anthony Anderson's character and his co-workers can't stop arguing about whose fault it was that Trump got elected. Meh. It hit some good jokes and funny notes, sure, like any successful network comedy ought to, but for my money this was a bit preachy and treacly.

So yeah - those are my fails, bails, and tales. How long will this shtick last? Can't say, but I've got my eye on some more fails and bails already. Gotta keep on keepin' on cuttin' that fat, folks!

Captain Fantastic

This was Marissa's favorite damn movie of 2016. Imagine that! I liked it too. A lot, even. But not as much as she did.

In short, it is a movie about a far, far, far left whackjob (Viggo!) who decides to raise his kids deep in the ass of the Pacific woods, teaching them how to hunt and rock climb and knife fight and read Nabukov. They're all, naturally, anti-social and ill-adjusted. But they're a family, goddammit! And when the going gets tough, well... see for yourself.

This was cute and fun and touching. What more could you want?

Nocturnal Animals

Man, some Oscars that was, huh? I'm all kinds of burnt out on 2016 movies at this point - can you blame me? - and still there are another five or ten I really, really want to see.

Nocturnal Animals was pretty stupid and really good. Or maybe really stupid and pretty good. Some great performances here, no question, and also some very pretty people looking even prettier because the director is a former creative director for Gucci which explains why he has such a firm grasp on what makes things visually compelling.

I liked this a good deal - top twenty on the year, out of almost sixty, so hey - but admittedly my brain is sort of turning into mush when it comes to rating and comparing and reviewing all these movies.

So, peace! (But really, this was fun. Go ahead and see it.)

Moana

Another pearl from Disney. This was bright and cheery and touching and loaded with ear worms from Lin-Manuel Miranda - heard of him? - and holy cow, I'm almost done watching movies for a long-ass time, but I'm glad I crammed this one in before the buzzer that is the 2016 Oscars tonight.

Kubo and the Two Strings

I watched Kubo last night and liked it plenty. But maybe not as much as I liked Coraline? Get back to me in a little while on this one - sometimes these kid-flicks need a little more time to marinate in my brain stew before I can tell just how good they were.

If nothing else, the labor of love that was simply making this gorgeous stop-motion movie should be commended and rewarded and cherished.

Florence Foster Jenkins

It's just Meryl Streep singing horribly and a bunch of men keeping her in the dark about it so as not to hurt her feelings. This felt both regressive and pointless. None of the characters were even believable. Look at the fucking Big Bang Theory guy over on the left side of the poster. That's the shit-eating mug he wore for the entire movie. And he's the ostensible good guy here.

Jackie

This was good as hell and if (when? when) Natalie Portman loses to Emma fucking Stone tomorrow night I will be as angry as a grown-ass man should be at the goddamn Academy Awards.

Again, sometimes I think my Letterboxd reviews turn out alright:

Not just the performance of Natalie Portman's lifetime, but a performance of the performance of Jackie Kennedy's lifetime as well, all dignity and composure in the face of newfound widowhood and media scrutiny. Portman's First Lady is calm and quiet through grief and anger, rarely breaking above a breathy, ornate whisper, at all times self-conscious of her image and her husband's legacy and how they'll come to be defined in the days following his untimely end. But the whole dang thing is this magnificent gem, shot and scored in this ethereal, haunting way, bouncing back and forth temporally, teetering between the private and the public, and finding a perfect balance overall of strength and fragility.

The Young Pope: Season 1

I'm still not sure what The Young Pope even was - it's possible no one is - but, damn, that's how you do a limited series. What a shame, then, that this has been renewed for a second season!

Truly though, any description of the show I could hazard wouldn't be worth the time it would take to type or read. You need to see this thing for yourself. First ten minutes. Check it out. Embrace the insanity. You'll know whether or not this is for you right around the time the words "Cherry Coke Zero" are uttered in the first episode.

The Ricky Gervais Show: Season 3

Here's the third and final season of The Ricky Gervais Show, or at least of the version that HBO cut up and animated. (For comparison's sake, the original radio/podcast show ran for five seasons of much longer episodes.)

In a bit of irony, I ended up "watching" this season almost entirely on my phone, via YouTube, while showering and driving - which is to say I treated it exactly like the podcast it originally was and ignored the animation entirely. Oh well!

It'd be sort of interesting to follow the careers of these three guys from where The Ricky Gervais Show ended, but there's not much to say. Ricky's maintained his high-C, low-B level celebrity by doing a lot of voicework and taking some minor roles in mid-budget movies. He hosted the Golden Globes a fourth time and he had that very panned show, Derek, in which he played a mentally handicapped guy. Stephen merchant had Hello Ladies, which ran for one year on HBO, and aside form that he's mostly been cast in guest appearances and bit parts as the tall and awkward British guy that he is. (He has fifth billing in the new Logan movie, for whatever that's worth.) And Karl... well, Karl was never interested in "having a career" in show business, was he? Karl followed up An Idiot Abroad with The Moaning of Life, which I understand to have the exact same premise (he travels the world and is - not acts like, but is - a buffoon) and which I just have no interest in at this time.

I guess what I'm getting at here is that this isn't an instance of a show ending because a young and talented cast is suddenly off to bigger and better things; there's still time for Merchant to carve out his own career, but that window is closing, and Ricky meanwhile is 55 himself. So why wouldn't I expect more Ricky Gervais Show at some point? Surely as long as these three remain on good terms with one another, they'll end up back in a recording studio at some point, checking in on Karl's latest beautiful, asinine takes.

Southbound

After four straight Best Picture nominees, it's time to cleanse the palate with another horror anthology. (Still racking up those 2016 movies!)

This one's got five loosely interconnected shorts, each about twenty minutes long, taking place in the same general vicinity - a deserted swatch of an unnamed highway cutting through the empty American Southwest.

I thought it was pretty hit or miss, with most of the hits coming early and most of the misses coming later - just like any movie that loses steam down the stretch, I guess.

There's just not a lot to this one. The five stories span horror genres admirably, but they don't really connect in any meaningful or thematically interesting way. I think I prefer the batshittery of Holidays to the dark but disposable Southbound. Still, give me these hit or miss horror anthologies over a feature length shitty horror movie like The Forest or Yoga Hosers any day.

Fences

When you binge a bunch of nominees and make snap judgments on them, you're bound to change your mind at least a little bit a few months or even years later. So, take this with a grain of salt, but Fences was my least favorite of the nine nominees for Best Picture this year. I know Keith and Danielle both liked it a lot more than I did, so maybe I was in the "wrong" frame of mind or something. But Denzel plays just a complete and utter asshole in this one, drunk and abusive and bitter and angry, proud as hell, and despite my best efforts to empathize with him, to understand the circumstances he was coming from - look, sixty years and a boatload of privilege separate my experience as a "man in America" from his - I just couldn't root for him. And maybe that's the point. And maybe Fences is a clever, bigger picture snapshot of how thoroughly the first half of the 20th century could fuck up a proud black man, and how "trickle down" injustice might lead such a man to take that anger out on his wife and his kid. Maybe we're not meant to sympathize with Denzel's character here. Maybe the point is to relate to said wife and kid - which I did, in no small part thanks   to Viola Davis, who is as good as advertised here. I readily acknowledge all of this, but Fences just felt like a real bummer in a way I'm not sure it was meant to.

I don't even think this was a bad movie! Again, let's let the dust settle on the Academy Awards before committing this take to stone, but the Oscar nominations of 2016? Not bad!

My ranked list, by the way?

1. Moonlight
2. Manchester by the Sea
3. Hell of High Water
4. La La Land
5. Arrival
6. Hacksaw Ridge
7. Lion
8. Hidden Figures
9. Fences

Subject to change, as always.

Hacksaw Ridge

So that's eight Best Picture nominees down, one to go for me. (Fences, soon enough!)

This was, simply put, a tale of two movies. Like Full Metal Jacket before it, this felt like two entirely different movies. Except unlike in Full Metal Jacket, this time around the first half is weak as hell and the second part's the memorable one.

The first half of Hacksaw Ridge was just awful - stilted, weird, unbelievable, and with a big dramatic arc that resolves itself when Andrew Garfield's shitty father comes through in the clutch to prevent him from getting court marshaled. The premise here is interesting enough - a deeply religious conscientious objector enlists in the Army because he's not afraid to die for his country; he just won't kill for it. His CO's and peers are, naturally, ripshit at the idea of fighting alongside a medic who would refuse to kill anyone in the heat of battle. But the execution just makes the protagonist look like this smarmy little dipshit, laughing at the very idea of being violent in the midst of, you know, war.

Then the second half comes and and all of a sudden we're up close and personal with the Battle of Okinawa and Hacksaw Ridge is one of the nastiest and most brutal war movies I've ever seen - maybe the goriest (discounting, you know, 300 and its ilk), definitely the most harrowing. And Andrew Garfield, this grinning "over it" religious bumpkin, is risking life and limb to save literally dozens of wounded soldiers, one by one, after an assault on Hacksaw Ridge goes awry.

The last war movie to be nominated for Best Picture was American Sniper a few years back, and frankly, I thought that one sucked ass. Not only because it was a boring movie - though that's certainly part of it - but because its deep red politics sucked loads of ass. "There are wolves and there are sheep, and my fellow soldiers are all sheep, and the wolves are out to kill them, so I will kill wolves in order to save sheep," was the basic mindset of Chris Kyle. There was no room for ambiguity there; the people resisting invasion were bad, and had to be put down like rabid dogs.

This movie almost feels like a direct rebuttal to that one. Because really, what's more heroic? Having  hundreds of confirmed kills on your record, or saving several dozen people without so much as wounding any on the other side?

In the end, I liked Hacksaw Ridge. It moved me. But it's only half decent, in the sense that half of it is this awful unwatchable cheese.

Lion

So, I just finished talking about how genuine and confident and straightforward and earnest Moonlight was. (I may not have used all of those words, exactly, but you know what I mean.) At the very least I'm pretty sure I described it as "not Oscar bait."

Lion, on the other hand - which I liked! - was a great, big heap of Oscar bait. You know what? It's been a while since we played a good old game of Bingo here - let's whip out a prestige drama Oscar bait card and have a go, shall we? (I'm not going to spoil anything that watching the Oscars won't spoil; even if you haven't seen Lion, you already know everything about it. Which doesn't mean it isn't worth watching! But yeah.)

Time-jump: Yes - several small ones, but the big one is twenty years.

Sad eating / food: Maybe - a particular street vendor's dish gives Saroo flashbacks that inspire him to go back to India in order to find his biological mother. But is this fundamentally "sad?" It's emotional food, for sure.

Overt racism: Maybe - is it racism if one Indian-Australian trolls another for being from a poor and shitty part of India? Or is that purely classism?

Divorce: No - in real life Saroo's father left when he was very young, but that doesn't mean it was technically a divorce. Were his parents ever even marries? And it isn't mentioned in the film either way; Sharoo just starts out here with a mother and no father.

Self-destructive behavior: Yes - Saroo's adopted brother's one defining characteristic is "smashes his own head repeatedly." A distant second is "hates his mom."

Time-jump epilogue: No - plenty of time jumps, but not at the end.

Funeral or wake: Yes - early on, Saroo witnesses a funeral procession in Calcutta. It's just sort of there for no reason, but the camera does linger on the body long enough for us to see it's a young boy.

Prologue: No - we jump right in.

Drugs: No - I don't think so, at least. Have I forgotten about any?

Epilogue text: Yes - oh hell yeah, like, three screens' worth.

Sitting alone at bar: No - again, I don't think so. As with drugs, please, correct me if I'm wrong.

Woman used as motivation: Yes - a big fat yes, in fact. Rooney Mara is in this movie for the sole purpose of encouraging and inspiring Sharoo.

Amy Adams or Jessica Chastain: Maybe - look, it's a no, but do you know who's here instead? Nicole Kidman. And she's a redhead. And the movie takes place largely in Australia. Tell me redhead Nicole Kidman isn't Australian Amy Adams...

Staring at own reflection: Maybe - can't remember this specifically, so this is likely a no, but at the same time I feel like this had to have happened at some point.

Tragic death of a spouse: No - no dead wives or dead husbands!

Sad cigarette: No - didn't notice one, at least.

Confession: Yes - Sharoo regretfully tells his adoptive parents that he's looking for his biological mother because Rooney Mara decides that he needs to do so.

A character is inspired: Yes - that's like the whole point of the third act. Have you not been listening?

Overt sexism: No - I can't go that far. "Overt" doesn't just mean that the movie punts Rooney to the curb for the third act and never succeeds in making her a character in the first place. No, overt means misogyny. None here.

A single tear: Yes - during and after the most emotional Google Earth search you've ever seen.

Dramatic rain: Yes - all over poor lost young Sharoo, who misses his family. Sorry little guy!

Staged removal of glasses: No - I don't even think anyone in the movie wears glasses.

Flashback to happier times: Yes - throughout the third act as Sharoo's childhood keeps flashing back to him.

Single parent: Yes - see "Divorce" above.

Let's see... do we have a Bingo?

Oh hell yeah we do. Top left to bottom right, all on pure hits without any maybes.

Eh, whatever. I'd still give Lion four stars out of five.

Moonlight

The hype was real! I expected big things, and very possibly even a new "favorite movie of 2016." Almost! For now, I'll give it the silver. The Lobster was just exactly what I want from a movie, guys. I make no apologies for that! But I'm not here to talk about The Lobster. Let's talk Moonlight.

This was quieter and gentler than I expected it to be, but also even stronger - and that soft confidence stems primarily from the trio of performances that constituted the main character through the years. (Oh yeah - if you didn't know, this is gay black Boyhood.) It's a subtle movie, but one that i'd be impossible to call pretentious. There's no hidden meaning here, no red herring, nothing "tricky." There's a boy. He becomes a teen, and then a man. He comes from circumstances, as people do. And it gets better. This is that story - loss of innocence, newfound confidence, and that awkward middle portion in between. (High school sucks, right?)

Now, La La Land is probably going to win Best Picture at the Oscars. I have some thoughts on that, but hey, whatever. That said, up until a month or two ago, Moonlight was the odds on favorite to win Best Picture. And it still might! But now that I've seen it, I don't think so. This is so vehemently not Oscar bait. It's a reserved, low-budget, low-concept movie without any star power or big names attached to it. Manchester by the Sea has a better shot. Hell, Arrival has a better shot. But here I go again, talking about movies that aren't Moonlight!

Moonlight was very, very good. Five stars. Mahershala Ali was just outstanding, captivating. Naomie Harris may have quietly been even better. What a genuine-feeling goddamn delight this was!

Rams

This isn't even one I'd heard great things about. Mixed things, more like it. But - but! - it's Icelandic as fuck and I loved just about everything about Iceland when I went there. Big fan, folks. So I gave this a shot. Ninety minutes, why not?

It was fine. Really nothing memorable. Had all the makings of a two-star movie right up until the ending, which was touching enough for that extra half star. Make sense? Anyway, this was middle of the road stuff, this here. You can safely ignore it.

Embrace of the Serpent

How much do the Oscars matter? I saw this movie appearing on a handful of 2016 year-end best lists and finally checked it out, only to learn (remember?) that it was a 2015 Oscar nominee for Best Foreign Film. Gah! (I still really want to see 2015 winner Son of Saul though.)

It was decent! Not great. I wanted more.

Two pet peeves with this one. One, despite taking place in the Amazon Rainforest, it was shot in black and white. I get what they were going for, I think; so much of the film's theme revolves around white outsiders (and by extension, we, the audience) vs. natives who live in the jungle, know the jungle, understand the jungle in ways they and we never will. So by desaturating it completely, you can make it feel extra alien, extra off-putting - not to mention extra old, which, hey, the movie takes place in the early 20th century, so why not? But still! It's the Amazon goddamn Rainforest! So lush and so green! Gimme that Planet Earth-quality nature footage. Wow me like Terrence Malick, "mood" and "atmosphere" and "vibes" be damned. (Eh. Fine. It's probably a lesser movie if it's in color.)

Second one - the movie's in nine different languages and none of them are English. (This in and of itself is fine.) So naturally it's subtitled. But holy hell, have you ever tried reading shadow-free white subtitles on a black and white background? Gimme those gross ugly yellow things, movie. Come on!

Alright, these complaints are weak as hell.

Batman: The Telltale Series

I've seen Batman in a vast array of different forms. There's been Robins who have put on the cowl, a universe where Batman becomes the Green Lantern (or the Bat-Lantern, if you will), even a version of Batman that's fulfilled by his father, Thomas Wayne, who uses a bunch a of guns and battles an alternate form of the Joker—his wife, Martha Wayne. Needless to say, in a world that has seemingly exhausted this character to death, what else is there left to do?

I guess that's only limited by your imagination, something that the folks at Telltale Games seem to have no boundaries on. Batman: The Telltale Series takes the Batman we know and love and throws him into the interactive narrative style I've also become accustomed to in other Telltale Games like The Wolf Among Us or The Walking Dead (never played the Game of Thrones versions, though). The main focus for this adaptation is to move away from the actual Dark Knight and put attention on the man behind the cowl, Bruce Wayne. 

By stripping Bruce from his armor, we get a more vulnerable and dynamic hero. We get to see how Bruce's politics in the public can actually help shape Gotham and, in turn, the characters who live in it. As with most "choose your own adventure" games, I'm always curious by how impactful my decisions are on the story. For instance, take the game Life is Strange. Stan and I both played this game and thoroughly enjoyed it, yet we had the same frustration -- our choices, however different, didn't seem to change the ending. The game will conclude on one final choice no matter how you play. You would think, in a game where all you do is make decisions, there should be a whole host of endings to land on... not just one. Thus is the downfall to some of these decision-focused games.

That said, I don't feel like Batman suffers from this problem (I say having only one play through). The main reason I have some level of confidence my decisions truly do create a whole slew of different narrative timelines is because when comparing notes with Sweeney, I realized that we managed to get two completely different Harvey Dents. Sween's Dent went the classic route of becoming Two-Face where I managed save Dent's face from being mangled (note: that didn't change him from becoming an evil asshole, though). OK, they may not be radical departures from one another, but they do carry slightly different paths and potentially different side stories. That in itself is satisfying. 

In these "choose your own adventure" style games, it's just more satisfying to see your decisions mean something. And through my decisions as Bruce Wayne I feel like I had the opportunity to see a Batman I don't normally encounter in other material. Yeah, I still played Wayne as the good guy rather than a raving lunatic, but, still... the fact that I got to put more attention on seeing how the public views Wayne, therefore relating to what public power he has, was a really interesting perspective. 

While the story was an interesting addition to the Batman-world, I do have some gripes—mostly being game glitches. Seriously, Telltale... this was borderline embarrassing for a developer with over a decade of experience. Scenes would have frequent loss of frame rates. Lag would often occur when making narrative decisions. Hell, one scene Martha Wayne completely lost her face. 

No wonder Bruce is haunted by the death of his parents. That's the face of nightmares!

Now, even the best of games will encounter the occasional glitch. Just look at Bethesda and Skyrim. That game is loaded with delightfully funny glitches that could cause characters to float off into the heavens for no reason at all. Then again, if this Batman title was an open-world sandbox game as massive as Skyrim, I might let it slide. But these Telltale games seem fairly straightforward. Sure, I know next to nothing when it comes to video game development and coding, however, it seems like these problems could be avoided in a game as linear as these. 

Whatever. A small gripe, but one I've seem to continuously notice in various Telltale titles. It's not going to prevent me from playing these games in the future, just a small wish it could be improved upon. But don't let my whiny complaint convince you that this game isn't worth playing. Far from it. Regardless if you're a Batman fan or not, this is a fairly quick play that's sure to entertain. 

Not to mention there will likely be a sequel. One based on some weird guy you first meet and build an innocuous relationship in this game. 

Seemed like a fairly gentle fellow. Wonder what could go wrong?

Krisha

Okay, I admit - I'm cranking out short 2016 movies at this point. This one's another eighty-minute breeze and it comes from A24, who can do no wrong it seems. Eh. I didn't love this. It was very well done, no question, but it depicts an older woman, an addict, struggling throughout a Thanksgiving weekend with her extended dysfunctional family. It was raw and messy and just felt very "slice of life," but it's not a life I wanted to be part of for even just eighty minutes. I realize that's the point - it must be emotionally exhausting both to be an addict and to deal with a loved one struggling with substance abuse. I dunno! This just wasn't for me. Still, can't call it a bad movie or even a boring one, and most other people seemed to really enjoy it.

The Fits

I liked this one a whole lot, but there really isn't much to it. (Which may have been what I liked about it.) Almost every character in this is a young black woman (there's one notable slightly less young black guy) and it takes place in a Cincinnati school and gym. The plot, inasmuch as there is one, revolves around an epidemic of shaking and seizures ("the fits") that seems to be affecting the girls on a dance team one by one, starting with the older girls, then working its way down the social totem pole. Main character Toni isn't worried about the fits at first, then resents her same-aged friends for having them, and the movie ends with - spoilers, yeah, but none of you are going to watch this - Toni enduring her own bout of the fits. Guys, the fits are a metaphor! Thin-as-hell story aside, I loved the way this thing was shot, the way it felt, the way it used nothing but first-time (and likely last-time) actors who were just inner city Cincinnati kids. It's eighty minutes long and on Amazon Prime if you feel like checking out some solid, simple film making.

The Little Prince

Can't stop won't stop. Gotta keep cranking out these 2016 movies so I can properly reflect on the year that was by the time the Oscars roll around in two weeks.

This? This was fine. Felt a lot like a Pixar movie, maybe ten percent less overtly cute and funny, ten percent more effectively poignant and sad.

A Bigger Splash

Sometimes a Letterboxd review suffices, and I feel okay about this one:

Hedonistic like a modern day Great Gatsby - less poignant, but funnier, sexier. This is one where rich, white rockstars saunter lazily around an Italian island with their friends and lovers. Everyone is barefoot and at least half-naked all the time and everything is flirting and jealousy and seduction. Ralph Fiennes is phenomenal here, all giggling and excited and dancing terribly and just having a fucking blast. Swinton's much more reserved, her character recovering from vocal chord surgery, her performance coming largely through stilted smiles and sunglasses. Struggles in the third act, exchanging the fun, decadent vibes for more of a straight farce, but Fiennes' party-loving goober alone makes it all worth it.

This is on HBO right now and while I can't think of anyone on the blog who'd like it more than I did, I mean, check it out if you like. This Ralph Fiennes performance is criminally underrated.

The Dresden Files: Changes (Book #12)

Twelve books in and I'm beginning to lose track of what's happening in these stories. For instance, as I'm typing out the title of this post, I blindly write in "book 11" before questioning myself, "Wait? Was this the eleventh book?" To double-check myself, I searched online to see book #11 was actually Turn Coat, the previous book I read and the series, and -- for the life of me -- I couldn't tell you what happened in that story. I know it has something to do with someone betraying someone else... but, ugh... my mind is a little frazzled keeping all these events in order. It's all turning into this magical stew of Die Hard-like action. 

That said, I don't think I'll have that same problem with this book. Changes is by far the most epic story to occur in the Dresden series... so far. The story opens with a huge spoiler -- Quite literally the first line of the novel is a bombshell of a reveal. And from that huge reveal, to story goes into high gear. Pulling in characters (both good and evil) from the entire franchise to build towards the largest fight Dresden has ever faced.

Changes is an appropriate title to this story as everything the readers have come to know and love about Dresden and his life are turned on their head or completely destroyed. Much like how Hermione comments at the end of the Order of the Phoenix (the movie version; can't comment on the novel), she says, "Everything is going to change now. Isn't It?" (Well. don't quote my quote. I'm paraphrasing here.) But that's the sentiment this book carries. Change.

I'm not sure if Butcher is able to write Dresden back into his former life or not after what choices and actions he's forced to make in this story, but even if he could go back... would I want him to? Tough call. 

All I can say is that I thoroughly enjoy this addition in the series. It might be my favorite so far. If not my favorite, then at least ranking in my top three. I'm chomping at the bit to see where Dresden goes from here. 

Sween, you still reading these? If you are, where ya at?

David Brent: Life on the Road

Loved The Office. Loved it so much I was one of those guys who (wrongly, spitefully) turned up my nose at the very existence of the American remake of The Office. But the thing about The Office that sat so well with so many people was that it wrapped itself up neatly after just two six-episode seasons and a two-part Christmas special. (Gotta love the Brits and their brevity. The longest-running British sitcom I can think of is Peep Show, which finally called it quits after... let's see... yeah, 54 episodes in total. Accounting for the half-hour episodes, that whole show had the same runtime from start to finish as the 27-episode first season of The O.C.)

I digress. My point is that Ricky Gervais and company seemed to know when to quit with The Office. Until they decided to bring it back - sort of - thirteen years later. Remember that small-scale redemption arc David Brent went through in the show's finale? Yeah - turns out, thirteen years later, he's still miserable and shallow and incessantly needy. In this movie, he takes a leave of absence from his new job (shitty, where he's no longer even a manager) in order to tour England with a crappy little band. It's funny enough, I guess, and it's always nice to revisit an old beloved show ('memba The Office?) but it doesn't really feel like it adds anything to The Office. Rather, if anything, the existence of this thing detracts from the show's wonderful finale.

It's still a must-see if you're a fan of the show, of course, but I can't imagine anyone seeing this without first seeing The Office and not shuddering.

Holidays

Still just chugging through 2016 releases over here. This is a horror anthology on Netflix - you know the drill, a collection of five or six horror shorts from different directors, much like V/H/S and its ilk - where all kinds of different holidays get the horror treatment. There were eight in total, meaning no short was more than fifteen minutes long or so. Here, let's tackle them in order.

"Valentine's Day"

An unpopular girl bullied by the rest of her swim team pines obsessively for her coach. This whole short seems to exist for the sake of a graphic punchline, but I'm okay with it! Sets the table appropriately. Felt like the kind of thing one of us might have tried to get away with in multimedia class (Keith, specifically?) but with actual production value.

"St. Patrick's Day"

Takes place in Ireland (of course) and the only scary moments involve a stereotypical "ginger" girl stalking her teacher and just looking creepy as all hell with a yellowy smile planted on her freckled face under wiry blonde-red hair. Gah! This one quickly gets campy and absurd, but in a head-slapping way fit for the holiday it honors.

"Easter"

So, what are the two symbolic representations of Easter? The late Jesus Christ and the Easter Bunny. And what are those, to a little girl? They're a man who came back from the dead and a giant furry thing that sneaks around your house at night. Holy shit, if any holiday was ripe for the horror treatment, it's this one! Probably the scariest of the stories - monsters, darkness - but also the slightest, thematically. (Which is saying something. All of these were slight.)

"Mother's Day"

A woman who gets pregnant every single time she has sex ends up kidnapped by some sort of witch covent in the desert. The payoff was weak as hell, which is a shame, because, well, what a set up.

"Father's Day"

All suspense, start to finish. Definitely the creepiest and most suspenseful of the shorts. Not worth describing - you've just got to see it.

"Halloween"

Ugh... Yeah, this was Kevin Smith's segment. It was absolute nonsense, which is what he specializes in now. It didn't even make sense. To his credit, he doesn't rely on a single preexisting Halloween trope, instead making a "horror" vignette about cam girls. This wasn't the worst of the shorts, but it was certainly the dumbest.

"Christmas"

Oh hey, Seth Green's in this one! A recognizable actor! Felt very Black Mirror - a man goes to desperate lengths to acquire a virtual reality headset for his son for Christmas, and when he tries it out  for himself he sees some pretty fucked up shit. I liked this one a lot, but that's maybe just because this is my favorite genre of horror - a blend of psychological and sci-fi.

"New Year's Eve"

An awkward first date turns into an, uh, unforgettable New Year's Eve. Best use of a New Year's countdown I've ever seen!

In the end, it's a mixed bag of "something for everyone." You've got some absurdly campy shit, some monster jump scares, some Black Mirror, some axe murder - none of it was great, but the variety alone makes this an easy collection to take in. I can't "recommend" it, but I had more fun with it than I did with V/H/S even if it feels like a lesser overall experience.

Split

Saw this last night with my sister. I know most of you haven't seen it yet, so no spoilers here, and a very brief recap.

1. James McAvoy was great. His was the only good performance, but it's more accurate to say he was giving half a dozen good performances.

2. Thought this was good, campy fun for about two thirds of its run time and then the third act breaks into something completely unexpected and substantially less clever than I hoped for.

3. About twenty minutes in I was convinced I knew "the twist" (every M. night movie's got one, come on, that's no spoiler) but the elements I thought the twist affected were, like, completely abandoned in the third act (as referenced above). So now I'm left with a theory - an unconfirmed twist I still believe could be true, really - and I'd love to talk about it with the rest of you. So, Keith, Trev - see this movie! See it so we can talk about it. Please!

This has also inspired me to go back and see a lot of the Shyamalan movies I missed out on before - notably, The Village, The Visit, and yes, even Unbreakable.

The Day the '60s Died

Fell down an Internet wormhole tonight - as one does - and wound up watching this entire hour-long PBS documentary on YouTube. Learned a lot. Was shocked and scared by how relevant and pertinent the events of Spring 1970 seem today, with the nation as divided as I've ever seen it and a legitimate animosity between the two factions. It's not the shootings or the Vietnam War protests that got to me - that's just 20th century American history at this point. Rather, it was the public reaction to the shootings. Polls showed a majority of Americans in 1970 thought that the students were more responsible for their own deaths than the National Guardsmen who fired upon them. "Should have killed them all," said plenty. This, even though a majority of Americans also didn't think we should have gone to Vietnam in the first place. Imagine that culture! Imagine a world where a significant group of people could oppose something, but then also find it justifiable to kill other people voicing such dissent. You think we're slipping into fascism now? Jesus Christ. To recap - in 1970, the American people were far more annoyed by the anti-war movement than they were by the war, even though a majority of them opposed the war. Wow!

Zooming out a bit - and this documentary kind of hints at this and sets it up without overtly focusing on it - Nixon and the Republican Party came out of this thing smelling like roses. Two years later, Nixon won reelection with over 500 electoral votes, and the GOP was able to finally capture blue collar white Americans from the Democrats - sound familiar? - a key demo they'd retain for decades, because blue collar white workers were fed up with rich college kids protesting, rioting, and sowing discord in America. (Okay, this is starting to feel too currently relevant and foreboding again. Time to stop.)

Here's the whole thing, right here. Check it out:

Sing Street

This was good. School of Rock was better. God Help the Girl was better. But this was good.

Twin Peaks: Season 1

I've been putting this one off for a while. Beloved '90s shows from Seinfeld to The X-Files have had a track record of disappointing me, and Sween's review a few years back wasn't exactly glowing, and for as much as I loved Mulholland Drive I worried that David Lynch wouldn't really be, you know, full blown David Lynch on network television in 1990.

But, here I am, through the first season of Twin Peaks - the good one, the short one - and, okay, yeah, I can see why everyone loved this so much. It's... weird. Delightfully weird, and unapologetically soapy. It's simultaneously about twenty years ahead of its time (only recently have even cable TV shows been allowed to be so strange and off-putting) and about twenty years younger than it looks in so many places - lily-white and set in the rural Pacific Northwest in some sort of alt-1990 still stuck the '50s. The dream sequences are what the show's most known for, but it's the little moments that really sold me on how weird and surreal this show is. Music plays and a guy breaks down crying in a crowded room then starts dancing all alone. A professional detective says goodbye to another one and then grabs his nose. A father, mourning for his dead daughter, grabs a photograph of her and just starts spinning in circles. It's all so wonderfully Lynchian, as is the recurring theme that plays nearly constantly in the background - the smooth, jazzy, film noir riff that really underliens what a goddamn mystery the whole thing is.

Who killed Laura Palmer? I've got no ideas, but frankly, I don't even care. What amazes me about this show is how unique it is today, let alone back in 1990. It is a treat to look at and to listen to, no matter how much or how little sense it's making. Rumor has it that things go downhill quickly in the second (and final) season, but with a revival slated for later this year on Showtime I'm interested in seeing it through. Hey, worst case, this becomes another X-Files experience that I throw on in the background and pay half attention to. I can swing that for 22 episodes, no question.

Firewatch

I listened to GameTimeBro podcast recapping the best games (three people played) for 2016. Lurking somewhere near the bottom was this guy. Struggling to find the next game to play... I settled on this. (Note: I coughed up $20 for this when only two days later Steam dropped the price by half. FML.)

OK, since building my own PC, I've been on the search to find games that truly punish my high-end GPU to make the most of my 4k screen (a whooooole lot of humble bragging going on here). Games like Skyrim and Doom (2016) both look incredible (shit... have I even posted in either one of those games?), and Resident Evil 7 was beyond-belief gorgeous. However, taking a step back from ultra realistic graphics, I found myself appreciating the art design of this game just as much as the other triple-A titles listed above. The colors and sprawling atmosphere of the park totally sucked me in as I found myself lost in a world of nature bound in surreal color.

The gameplay itself isn't anything to speak of. It's mostly a dialogue selector accompanied by exploring/navigating an uncharted map. But the point of this games (and others like it) is to experience the narrative in a way that's different from movies or novels. A way some might see as slightly more immersive. 

So, then... How was the story?

The story was good. Actually it was really interesting the more and more I think of it (having only beaten it yesterday). Your character is one that's running away from life's problems by spending the summer isolated off from the real world as a park ranger in the middle of a giant nature preserve. Your best friend turns out to be your boss and fellow ranger. Delilah, stationed across the way whom only keeps in contact via walkie-talkies. What really gets the story going is while out on a routine check to stop some kids from having a good time, your character encounters signs that there might be a nefarious third-party lurking in these (now) ominous woods. Before you know it you're attacked, and the story evolves into a tale of paranoia and suspicion that someone is out to get you. 

While I'm very impressed that they did a lot with what seemed like so little in this game, the climax felt underwhelming. Not that I needed a big fight scene or a giant explosion to cap this adventure off, but it just felt like my character wasn't rewarded in any capacity. Hell, I didn't even get to meet Delilah! I'm well aware that wasn't the intension of the creators here. To be fair, it's still a good ending that beautifully ties in the thematically problems your character is struggling with (e.g. isolation, running away from your problems, etc.). In many ways, by discovering this mysterious third party (ok, we've all played this, so I'm not spoiling anything) -- I mean Ned --  we learn that he's no different from your character. In fact he might be a premonition of what you could become if you stay on this path of trying to escape your problems instead of dealing with them.

It's not a bad ending. It's a fitting ending. Unfortunately, it's just not my preferred ending. However, it is an ending that really made me think and dwell over the consequence of trying to take easy path to avoid confrontation and responsibility. And if that's what the creators were aiming for, then they succeeded. 

Back to GameTimeBro... I'm not sure I would have put this in my top-10 list (if I've even played ten games from 2016), but I am glad I've experience it. 

I just wished I hadn't paid $20 to do so.