reviews

I haven't been using this blog, and I haven't been feeling up to writing much about anything. Except— for whatever reason, I've been able to write reviews. So I've been doing a lot of that.

The ones for movies are on this movie cataloging site, Letterboxd; here's my page there. I've written up every movie I saw in the last four months, don't know if I'll keep that up, but it's what I'm doing right now. Stuff about books is here on Goodreads, although I'm not reading as much these days as I'd like.

There isn't any site like that for TV stuff as far as I know, so anything about TV, I'll just put here.

TV: Daredevil, season 3 (Netflix, 2018)

(I watched a lot of Netflix shows recently. Here's the first.)

I liked season 2 and its ninja hijinks pretty well, but I think it was a good idea to get back to basics with Daredevil as a low-budget vigilante in an improvised costume (part of which is now, hilariously, made out of a wimple stolen from a convent).

As usual, none of the stuff about "normal" people, or New York City in general, is at all convincing (even though they've stopped trying so hard to pretend that midtown Manhattan has tons of street crime)—it wouldn't have been too hard to make the subplots about law enforcement and politics make more sense than this, so I assume it just wasn't a priority.

What Daredevil is best at is emotion. ( Read more... )

TV: Big Mouth, season 1 (Netflix, 2018)

This is sort of an anti-nostalgia show, in that it wants to remind you how scary and disgusting it was to be 13. I didn't feel I needed that, so I hadn't really been tempted to watch it. Well, it's pretty great.
( Read more... )

TV: She-Ra and the Princesses of Power, season 1 (Netflix, 2018)

I'm not really the target for this since I'm neither 1. a little girl nor 2. someone with nostalgia for the '80s version (I think I watched it once or twice, but I knew it was related to He-Man and I didn't like He-Man because I didn't like anything with big muscles in it). But it's really good even without the nostalgia. The style is a blend of various kinds of '80s fantasy art with the look of many modern popular kids' comics—i.e. the comics that the new show's creator Noelle Stevenson has worked on—and Stevenson and the other writers bring some solid storytelling and character development, and a concern for diversity, while keeping it (I think) very accessible for kids. It's simultaneously high-minded and plain fun.
( Read more... )

TV: Chilling Adventures of Sabrina, season 1 (Netflix, 2018)

I wanted to see this show because Kiernan Shipka is in it; more about that later. The basic setup comes from the recent Archie Comics thing, which was a scarier version of the long-running Sabrina the Teenage Witch and its many spin-offs (I haven't read or seen any of them), so this isn't exactly a case of trying to come up with a new take on a supernatural youth series.

Still, there are a few things that set it apart from Buffy, Charmed, etc. ( Read more... )