kaleidoscope heart

I have had a circular journey with the movie The Mandalorian and Grogu. At first I thought 'That's not a real movie', then I thought 'Well, maybe the movie is real but that's obviously a joke name the internet has given it,' and then I wondered 'Did Disney forget to swap out the working title?' And now, having seen the trailer I have come all of the way back around to 'This movie isn't real.'

Speaking of movies that aren't real, The Thursday Murder Club is less an actual movie than it is an extremely pricey episode of Midsomer Murders

Telly is real, though.

I frickin' adored Alien: Earth even though, had you been in the room with me while I was watching it, all you would have heard was a near constant litany of 'OH, NO. EW, GROSS. AGHH! THAT'S SO UNPLEASANT. PUT THAT BACK WHERE YOU FOUND IT OR SO HELP ME!

Some things I particularly enjoyed: Boy Kavalier being the sort of SBF/Altman/Musk amalgamation so icky that you want to join the Xenomorph war on he side of the Xenomorphs. Weyland Yutani's continued insistence on sending people so underpaid/underequipped/unqualified that they don't know about shatterproof glass to collect the universe's most dangerous biological specimens. The unsubtle, tonally jarring, but completely epic mic drops at the end of each episode. The adult actors playing children in grown up bodies by moving like they didn't know what a back spasm was. That they didn't try to hide what the Xenomorph looked like as though we didn't all know.

One thing that I did not like: The horrifying eyeball monster/evil sheep combo. Kill it with fire. And rocks. And rocks which are on fire.

'This is not a good television show,' I say to myself at three o'clock in the morning as I hit 'next episode' on The Hunting Wives. I guess I will once again reiterate that 'good' and 'great' are not the same thing.

My two favourite bits of this show were i) the flashback to how the main character met her husband and it's just that he happened to be the first man who ambled into her field of view when she was having a moment of gay panic, ii) when one of the secondary characters keeps saying to the woman she's in love with that they can't be together openly, and, like, obviously not, because she's a horrible murderer who is only pretending to take you back so she can find out if your sheriff husband (also gay) suspects her, but I do not think that is what you meant.

A lot of the Marvel telly stuff of late has had a whiff of 'What's the point?' about it, having obviously been put in motion before Marvel pivoted and now being sent out to die, which is a bummer in the case of the two most recent animated shows which were pretty solid.

Eyes of Wakanda had an awesome art style, expanded the world of Wakanda without getting tangled in the weeds of Boseman's passing, and gave us an Iron Fist that didn't suck.

I don't think anyone had particularly high expectations of a spin-off from a 2021 episode of a show that has since fizzled out, but Marvel Zombies went so much harder than it had to. It was neat to see Kamala, Shang-Chi, Kate and other characters that I don't think are coming back in live action in any meaningful way get room to play.

It did seem to be angling for a second season at the end there, but, like...come on, bro, be realistic.