A media roundup, for this week... ish!
Things I've read:- Hmmm...
Dracula Daily hit a couple long days, lol.
- Taylor and I read the novella that accompanied
Spelunking Through Hell, "Sweep Up the Wood". I very much enjoyed it - the story is placed along the Buckley timeline, and covers the time in which [redacted] dies, and Alice and Thomas (finally!) get together for the first time. (This is sort of the "conclusion", I think, to the timeline that the previous novellas and short stories cover, even if there's currently still something of a gap.)
I enjoy Alice and Thomas at that point in their personal timelines, and it is satisfying to see them finally get on the same page(ish) with each other, after knowing they've spent years having their relationship thwarted.
Thomas 100% going all-in on the idea that Alice was actually a werewolf trying to hide her lycanthropy from him was A+ and quite cute actually.
As a side note, I really did enjoy reading all the short stories tracing the family prior to the main-series generation.
- I also read
Be the Serpent's accompanying novella, "Such Dangerous Seas".
The Luidaeg is always my fave, so I enjoy getting to find out more of her history through the novellas, and this was definitely a big one. Hard not to get spoilery, but I still love The Luidaeg, and I still very much hate Evening by every name she goes by. Her mom ain't great, either.
- Since then I've started (if barely) a re-read of
Sparrow Hill Road. Typically I try to not read THAT much by the same author in a row, unless it's a series, but this one is research on the canon!
Things I've played:- I played
Bioshock for a few hours one night, because Alex said he wanted to watch me play it, ha.
Though this time I convinced him it wouldn't really be too much for him to play if he wanted to, and while I'm glad for him to give it a go, it feels like just a slight bummer that he doesn't "need" me to play it now, haha.
Oddly, both the night I played it, and the following day when Alex did, Broccoli Cheddar Bomb got VERY talkative. Apparently he'd like to play, haha.
Things I've watched:- Alex and I went to see
Smile in the theater. I thought it was fairly decent, though I've got a few thoughts about it, and can see some of the reasons some people didn't care for it.
It was well-acted, and the production values are good. The cinematography is noticeable - there are a lot of either very long (as in duration) shots, and a few that play with perspective with shots that go upside-down or spin in some way. I liked it well enough, though I don't know that those choices accentuated anything in particular with the story, beyond a general disorientation.
( Cut for thoughts about the major theme/horror element, in case it's too spoilery: )One additional warning: I didn't notice any real strobe-y effects throughout, but for SOME reason the fucking title has a really dramatic blinking strobe effect that was obnoxious to ME, and I'm not typically sensitive to that sort of thing. I genuinely do not understand why they went for that, because it was annoying and had no relevance to the themes or style of the film otherwise.
- Alex and I watched
Absentia, which I enjoyed! I hadn't heard of it before, and didn't realize until after Alex picked it that it was Mike Flanagan as director, again. Apparently I do mostly enjoy his stuff. This one was a kickstarter film, I believe, so done on a pretty low budget, but even so, managed to be better than a lot of things with more money behind them.
The main plot is that one of the main characters has just reached the point where she has declared her husband, missing for years, dead in absentia. The other main character, her younger sister, is visiting her for the first time in a long while, after having done a stint in rehab. The younger sister meets a strange man (PLAYED BY DOUG JONES. FUCK YEAH, YOU WEIRD CONTORTIONIST MAN.) in a tunnel near the house, though he vanishes when she goes back to see him again. Then the day after the missing husband is declared dead... he (the husband, not Doug Jones) returns, claiming to have been held captive for years "underneath." The younger sister begins to suspect the tunnel is responsible for many disappearances over the course of decades, if not centuries.
- We watched the first few episodes of the new season of
The Handmaid's Tale. I hadn't heard great things from critics who pre-screened the first several episodes, and it seems more damning that *I didn't realize any episodes had come out yet.* (Alex really likes the show, and has been excited for the next season, and we didn't realize it had started!)
I... was not terribly impressed. I haven't much loved the last couple of seasons, even as I did really think the first two were very good. This one... I guess it's been better-received than last season, but I didn't care for it much. My complaints were similar-ish to some of the critical ones I'd seen - like... can something happen, please? Stop posturing and DO SOMETHING.
But I think my issue was more... Gilead doesn't feel like Gilead? Suddenly they're taking Serena (relatively) seriously, there are handmaids-in-training talking back, wives are thanking the handmaids who gave birth to their children (if semi-reluctantly and covertly).
( Cut for a bit of length: )- We also watched the first seven episodes of
The Patient, a show about a serial killer who kidnaps his therapist in the hopes of having constant access to therapy so as to prevent himself from giving in to his homicidal urges.
This one I enjoyed reasonably well so far. Alex was binging it, so my attention was wavering (I really can't watch one thing for that long, ha.) But it's well-acted (Steve Carell in serious roles is still surprisingly good.)
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Grizzly Rage, a SyFy original about a very un-sci-fi bear taking revenge on a car full of college kids who hit and killed her cub, was very bad. Even from the "I love revenge, go fuck 'em up!" perspective it was bad. Bad effects, bad acting (and worse writing.) Felt like a first draft.