Things I've been watching
Aug. 24th, 2021 08:30 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lucymonsterThe last few weeks worth of accumulated telly and movies. Accidentally, I've organised this post by degree of TL;DR.
What We Do in the Shadows TV
I binged both seasons across a couple of days and it was SO DAMN GOOD. Aaaaall my favourite vampire tropes were there, along with some unexpected new ones - like Colin Robinson, a beige, balding, generic office worker who is actually an energy vampire who 'hunts' by boring his colleagues near-comatose and feeding off their drowsy despair. I'm now pretty sure at least a few of my past coworkers have been energy vampires. The dead walk among us. It's true, it's all true.
Marvel's What If...?
I don't know what it says about the state of the MCU that I enjoyed the first two episodes of this throwaway animation more than I've enjoyed the whole combined live-action output of the last three years. But whatever, it was so much fun. Musclebound Peggy Carter was super hot, Starlord T'Challa gave me all kinds of feelings, and the appearances of some of my most beloved obscure cosmic ladies made me ridiculously happy. I think I like it enough to start requesting as a standalone favourite in exchanges. I mostly prefer my cosmic MCU f/f, but AU Nebula/T'Challa couldn't help piquing my interest.
Ted Lasso Season 2
So far the new season has not disappointed! I was wondering how they planned to keep it fresh after relying so heavily on the charming novelty of Ted in season 1, and it turns out the answer is by dialing Ted's antics back half a notch and letting the supporting cast step to the fore. They're all wonderful. Rebecca is 'hot older woman' vibes to a degree that makes me blush just writing about her; Keeley is the bright ray of sunshine I wish I was on my good days; Roy Kent is the swearing, snarling truth-teller I wish I was on my bad days. I'm a bit confused about their choice to air a Christmas special in August, but whatever, it'll be fun to rewatch when the appropriate time comes.
I didn't feel like I needed a second season after the original ten episodes, but I'm now feeling glad to have gotten one anyway.
Tiny World
This is a nature documentary about tiny creatures, narrated by Paul Rudd of Ant-Man fame! I admit I went in with some healthy skepticism about the lack of Sir David Attenborough, but the joke's funny and he does a good job. The way they've edited the footage is also frequently very funny - lots of close-up slowmo of fingernail-sized critters battling heroically for foraging and mating rights to urgent orchestral music, followed by pan-outs to human scale view of the scene. I like the way they've mixed fond humour with an earnest sense of wonder at all the diverse, clever ways these little lifeforms have found to survive.
The cinematography is spectacular. There are bits and pieces of visible CG - add-in shots of single raindrops, that sort of thing - but my understanding is that everything important is real. They apparently shot a combined 3,000+ hours of footage over what added up to ten years worth of filming days just to get twelve half-hour episodes, and the effort shows.
I especially enjoyed S1E4, Outback. It felt odd to see such (to me) completely normal Australian scenery framed as exotic and a bit scary, but I guess anyone who lived around the Amazon would probably feel the same about many of the docos I've watched like they were portals to a magical fairy-world. That's just what happens when you go outside, mate. There's gum trees and rainbow lorikeets and shit, and yes, it's on the warm side, and yes, it sometimes catches fire. They did a beautiful job with the filming though, and since Current Events have had me confined inside the city for a while now, it was nice to bring a little glimpse of home indoors.
Lords of Chaos
I ... don't know that I enjoyed this, exactly. It was thought-provoking? It kept me engaged? Actually, this was my second attempt to watch it: I tried around the time it first came out, but noped out hard at the graphic suicide scene 30 minutes in. So I guess it deserves points for being compelling enough to stick in my brain all this time and make me want to come back.
It's a biopic about the band Mayhem and the founding of the Norwegian black metal scene. For the happily uninitiated, no, that doesn't mean pedantic hyperlocal music history - it means a years-long spree of church burnings, murders and general human scumbaggery that set a lasting, shameful cultural standard in the underground metal world. Some of the main players have grown up and straightened their heads out; others, uh, haven't. (Varg Vikernes is Big Mad that he was portrayed by a Jewish actor.) Although the film is critical of its subject matter, it plays along uncritically with the fondness for shock tactics. There's a lot of very graphic self-harm. Some brutal murder scenes, including one where a random gay man gets stabbed to death for the fun of it. When women appear on screen, it's generally for one of two reasons: to be fucked from behind by one of the male characters, or to stand in the background as a sexy lamp. It's a deeply ugly film, in a way that makes perfect sense for the story but just isn't especially pleasant to watch.
What I did really like was how it captured the reality - sometimes genuinely dark, but more often pretentious and a bit embarrassing - of edgy youth subcultures. My local Catchall Black-Clad Sulkers Who Like Screechy Music scene (we were too small to get more specific lol) was a ghost-pale suburban imitation of the shit that went down in Norway, but the underlying attitudes were familiar enough: gatekeeping, competitive maladjustedness, lionisation of the kids who acted out the worst, and a total misunderstanding of how we actually looked to the society we thought we were scoring points against. We were dumb but essentially harmless; so were most of the kids in Norway, except they had the bad luck of getting in over their heads with a few legitimately bad actors. Real evil isn't a spooky, glamorous force sent forth by Satan; it's a byproduct of mundane, unimpressive human self-absorption. Men like Varg Vikernes aren't the towering figures of dark power they think they are. They're just sad, stunted, dysfunctional people with a special knack for making their dysfunction everyone else's problem.
Anyway. Watching Lords of Chaos made for a very uncomfortable evening, and I don't necessarily recommend it to anyone, but I'm also not sorry I watched because I thought it did well at what it set out to do.
John Wick
I'm kind of amazed at how much I enjoyed this. On paper, it could hardly be more designed to turn me off: the dog dies, the wife gets fridged, and the main hook is the implausibly large amount of gun violence it manages to pack into its runtime. But I got in one of those listless moods where I just want to flop on the couch and let someone else shoulder the burden of entertaining me, and my husband, as usual, knows my trashy id better than I know it myself. Sad man with floppy dark hair commits acts of unspeakable violence while being, just like, totally the saddest! Of course I was going to love it.
But my self-deprecation is doing John Wick a disservice, because actually I think it's a very well-made movie in its own right. It knows it's silly, and it makes no apologies for being silly, and it leans into the silliness in a way that's satisfying while still maintaining a surprising level of good taste. The violence is creatively brutal but not particularly gory - I mean, there's still more blood than pre-exposure therapy me would have been able to cope with, but there are no lingering shots of wounds or viscera. The emphasis is all on the initial shock of each hit and on how badass John Wick is for landing them, rather than on the messy consequences of blowing people's brains out.
The casting and character writing was also excellent. Obviously Wick is a riff on the stock cold-hard-manly-killing-machine archetype, but he's also got depth and vulnerability: he cries on camera, he's shamelessly soft for his dog, and he loves his wife with tender, open devotion. Keanu Reeves makes his grief for her feel almost unbearably real. He's also scrupulously principled in his killing, for action movie values of principled: yes, he starts gun fights in crowded civilian areas, but he's super duper careful not to hit any civilians himself. He also doesn't kill women, even when they're doing a very good job of trying to kill him. Meanwhile, the victims of his murderous rampage are so utterly, irredeemably villainous that I wasn't inconvenienced by a single pang of guilt while cheering for their gruesome deaths. They literally kick puppies! I feel a bit bad for poor Alfie Allen: I'm sure he's a nice enough bloke, but god, his face is THE MOST PUNCHABLE FACE OF ALL TIME. He does 'cowardly asshole with an ego he can't back up' so well, I don't want to watch him in any other role.
The other thing that charmed me was the worldbuilding. Again, this is a movie that knows how silly its premise is, but it carries that premise through faithfully to all its logical conclusions. If there's really a thriving underworld of glamorous wealthy assassins who are constantly shooting each other up, then there must be specialist cleaning squads who earn good money by discreetly sweeping in after every massacre and mopping up the blood! There must be a whole world of services just for assassins, like assassins-only social hubs where they can network with each other under strict no-kill agreements, and hotels that cater to their unusual security needs, and unflappable doctors willing to stitch up stab wounds at all hours of the day and night without asking any questions! I'm always a sucker for stories about regular people fitting their lives around the shenanigans of heroes, and this movie delivered on that in spades.
Apparently there are plans to expand the franchise into some sort of John Wick Cinematic Universe. I'm skeptical about the need for one, but I'm at least going to watch the existing sequels. I had so much fun.
What We Do in the Shadows TV
I binged both seasons across a couple of days and it was SO DAMN GOOD. Aaaaall my favourite vampire tropes were there, along with some unexpected new ones - like Colin Robinson, a beige, balding, generic office worker who is actually an energy vampire who 'hunts' by boring his colleagues near-comatose and feeding off their drowsy despair. I'm now pretty sure at least a few of my past coworkers have been energy vampires. The dead walk among us. It's true, it's all true.
Marvel's What If...?
I don't know what it says about the state of the MCU that I enjoyed the first two episodes of this throwaway animation more than I've enjoyed the whole combined live-action output of the last three years. But whatever, it was so much fun. Musclebound Peggy Carter was super hot, Starlord T'Challa gave me all kinds of feelings, and the appearances of some of my most beloved obscure cosmic ladies made me ridiculously happy. I think I like it enough to start requesting as a standalone favourite in exchanges. I mostly prefer my cosmic MCU f/f, but AU Nebula/T'Challa couldn't help piquing my interest.
Ted Lasso Season 2
So far the new season has not disappointed! I was wondering how they planned to keep it fresh after relying so heavily on the charming novelty of Ted in season 1, and it turns out the answer is by dialing Ted's antics back half a notch and letting the supporting cast step to the fore. They're all wonderful. Rebecca is 'hot older woman' vibes to a degree that makes me blush just writing about her; Keeley is the bright ray of sunshine I wish I was on my good days; Roy Kent is the swearing, snarling truth-teller I wish I was on my bad days. I'm a bit confused about their choice to air a Christmas special in August, but whatever, it'll be fun to rewatch when the appropriate time comes.
I didn't feel like I needed a second season after the original ten episodes, but I'm now feeling glad to have gotten one anyway.
Tiny World
This is a nature documentary about tiny creatures, narrated by Paul Rudd of Ant-Man fame! I admit I went in with some healthy skepticism about the lack of Sir David Attenborough, but the joke's funny and he does a good job. The way they've edited the footage is also frequently very funny - lots of close-up slowmo of fingernail-sized critters battling heroically for foraging and mating rights to urgent orchestral music, followed by pan-outs to human scale view of the scene. I like the way they've mixed fond humour with an earnest sense of wonder at all the diverse, clever ways these little lifeforms have found to survive.
The cinematography is spectacular. There are bits and pieces of visible CG - add-in shots of single raindrops, that sort of thing - but my understanding is that everything important is real. They apparently shot a combined 3,000+ hours of footage over what added up to ten years worth of filming days just to get twelve half-hour episodes, and the effort shows.
I especially enjoyed S1E4, Outback. It felt odd to see such (to me) completely normal Australian scenery framed as exotic and a bit scary, but I guess anyone who lived around the Amazon would probably feel the same about many of the docos I've watched like they were portals to a magical fairy-world. That's just what happens when you go outside, mate. There's gum trees and rainbow lorikeets and shit, and yes, it's on the warm side, and yes, it sometimes catches fire. They did a beautiful job with the filming though, and since Current Events have had me confined inside the city for a while now, it was nice to bring a little glimpse of home indoors.
Lords of Chaos
I ... don't know that I enjoyed this, exactly. It was thought-provoking? It kept me engaged? Actually, this was my second attempt to watch it: I tried around the time it first came out, but noped out hard at the graphic suicide scene 30 minutes in. So I guess it deserves points for being compelling enough to stick in my brain all this time and make me want to come back.
It's a biopic about the band Mayhem and the founding of the Norwegian black metal scene. For the happily uninitiated, no, that doesn't mean pedantic hyperlocal music history - it means a years-long spree of church burnings, murders and general human scumbaggery that set a lasting, shameful cultural standard in the underground metal world. Some of the main players have grown up and straightened their heads out; others, uh, haven't. (Varg Vikernes is Big Mad that he was portrayed by a Jewish actor.) Although the film is critical of its subject matter, it plays along uncritically with the fondness for shock tactics. There's a lot of very graphic self-harm. Some brutal murder scenes, including one where a random gay man gets stabbed to death for the fun of it. When women appear on screen, it's generally for one of two reasons: to be fucked from behind by one of the male characters, or to stand in the background as a sexy lamp. It's a deeply ugly film, in a way that makes perfect sense for the story but just isn't especially pleasant to watch.
What I did really like was how it captured the reality - sometimes genuinely dark, but more often pretentious and a bit embarrassing - of edgy youth subcultures. My local Catchall Black-Clad Sulkers Who Like Screechy Music scene (we were too small to get more specific lol) was a ghost-pale suburban imitation of the shit that went down in Norway, but the underlying attitudes were familiar enough: gatekeeping, competitive maladjustedness, lionisation of the kids who acted out the worst, and a total misunderstanding of how we actually looked to the society we thought we were scoring points against. We were dumb but essentially harmless; so were most of the kids in Norway, except they had the bad luck of getting in over their heads with a few legitimately bad actors. Real evil isn't a spooky, glamorous force sent forth by Satan; it's a byproduct of mundane, unimpressive human self-absorption. Men like Varg Vikernes aren't the towering figures of dark power they think they are. They're just sad, stunted, dysfunctional people with a special knack for making their dysfunction everyone else's problem.
Anyway. Watching Lords of Chaos made for a very uncomfortable evening, and I don't necessarily recommend it to anyone, but I'm also not sorry I watched because I thought it did well at what it set out to do.
John Wick
I'm kind of amazed at how much I enjoyed this. On paper, it could hardly be more designed to turn me off: the dog dies, the wife gets fridged, and the main hook is the implausibly large amount of gun violence it manages to pack into its runtime. But I got in one of those listless moods where I just want to flop on the couch and let someone else shoulder the burden of entertaining me, and my husband, as usual, knows my trashy id better than I know it myself. Sad man with floppy dark hair commits acts of unspeakable violence while being, just like, totally the saddest! Of course I was going to love it.
But my self-deprecation is doing John Wick a disservice, because actually I think it's a very well-made movie in its own right. It knows it's silly, and it makes no apologies for being silly, and it leans into the silliness in a way that's satisfying while still maintaining a surprising level of good taste. The violence is creatively brutal but not particularly gory - I mean, there's still more blood than pre-exposure therapy me would have been able to cope with, but there are no lingering shots of wounds or viscera. The emphasis is all on the initial shock of each hit and on how badass John Wick is for landing them, rather than on the messy consequences of blowing people's brains out.
The casting and character writing was also excellent. Obviously Wick is a riff on the stock cold-hard-manly-killing-machine archetype, but he's also got depth and vulnerability: he cries on camera, he's shamelessly soft for his dog, and he loves his wife with tender, open devotion. Keanu Reeves makes his grief for her feel almost unbearably real. He's also scrupulously principled in his killing, for action movie values of principled: yes, he starts gun fights in crowded civilian areas, but he's super duper careful not to hit any civilians himself. He also doesn't kill women, even when they're doing a very good job of trying to kill him. Meanwhile, the victims of his murderous rampage are so utterly, irredeemably villainous that I wasn't inconvenienced by a single pang of guilt while cheering for their gruesome deaths. They literally kick puppies! I feel a bit bad for poor Alfie Allen: I'm sure he's a nice enough bloke, but god, his face is THE MOST PUNCHABLE FACE OF ALL TIME. He does 'cowardly asshole with an ego he can't back up' so well, I don't want to watch him in any other role.
The other thing that charmed me was the worldbuilding. Again, this is a movie that knows how silly its premise is, but it carries that premise through faithfully to all its logical conclusions. If there's really a thriving underworld of glamorous wealthy assassins who are constantly shooting each other up, then there must be specialist cleaning squads who earn good money by discreetly sweeping in after every massacre and mopping up the blood! There must be a whole world of services just for assassins, like assassins-only social hubs where they can network with each other under strict no-kill agreements, and hotels that cater to their unusual security needs, and unflappable doctors willing to stitch up stab wounds at all hours of the day and night without asking any questions! I'm always a sucker for stories about regular people fitting their lives around the shenanigans of heroes, and this movie delivered on that in spades.
Apparently there are plans to expand the franchise into some sort of John Wick Cinematic Universe. I'm skeptical about the need for one, but I'm at least going to watch the existing sequels. I had so much fun.
