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DVD and TV Logging
Batman vs. Robin - This animated movie felt hollow. Some of that was that the characterization leaned heavily on viewers having previous knowledge from other movies and/or from canon. It felt a lot like seeing the last act of a Shakespearian tragedy performed without the first four acts. Sure, I can use my knowledge of the larger canon to understand, but it doesn't work nearly as well because it's flat and completely unearned. Also, the structure of Batman's first (on screen?) fights with the Talons definitely look like he's perfectly happy to straight up murder them, and that undercuts everything he says to Robin. There'd have been fewer action scenes, but I think the emotional threads would have been more powerful if the focus had been on the problems between Bruce and Damian rather than between Batman and Robin.
Bill & Ted Face the Music - This was okay. It's been a long time since Scott and I watched the original movies, and they were never great favorites of ours. I enjoyed the ridiculousness of the characters' efforts to find a shortcut (or any path at all) to saving the universe.
Books that Have Made History: Books that Can Change Your Life - Great Courses lecture series by Professor J. Rufus Fears. The lecturer is a great performer in the tent revival preacher sense, but there's a skew to the lectures that makes me think he's probably perpetually puzzled by why his most promising students become fascists.
A Cat in Paris - Animated in a style I dislike. About an hour long. Story of a widowed cop, her daughter, a gentleman catburglar, a bunch of nastier crooks, and a cat.
Charlie's Angels (2019) - I had more fun with this than I really expected that I would. The whole thing with me not being able to follow action scenes makes a lot of movies much more difficult than they used to be. I'll look away, so as not to get sick, and get distracted and discover that I've missed 5-10 minutes and a chunk of plot/characterization that I really needed (on top of what I already miss because it's in the middle of migraine territory).
The Cold Blue - This is a documentary about WWII bomber crews in Europe. It includes comments from the few survivors who were still alive when the documentary was made (the library lists it as released in 2019). Scott is very interested in planes and in aviation history. I don't think that he saw much that was new to him, apart from the clips of the veterans one of whom showed equipment he'd brought home after the war. The person doing the filming mentioned that all of that is still property of the US government, and the old guy laughed. I learned a bit, but I also wasn't paying close attention, so there might well have been stuff I missed. My grandfather, my mother's father, was in the Army Air Corps and trained as a bomber pilot. I don't think he ever flew a combat mission, but he was drafted for Korea as a flight instructor.
Digging for Britain season 1 - No captions so I lost some details. Season 1 has four episodes. Archaeology in Great Britain, aimed at a general audience. This was fine but not a show I'll seek out again.
The Emperors of Rome - Great Courses lecture series by Professor Garrett G. Fagan of Pennsylvania State University. This was covering material I know well enough to find completely familiar but not well enough to be able to explain myself. The lecturer has a bit of a stutter but is clearly experienced and knowledgeable. I enjoyed the series.
The History of Spain: Land on a Crossroad - Great Courses. 24 lectures by Professor Emerita Joyce Salisbury of the University of Wisconsin, Green Bay. This was fine, not great, not terrible, and not (as far as I could tell) inaccurate.
Kipo and the Age of the Wonderbeasts seasons 1-3 - Middle grade cartoon series. I have no idea how the ecosystems work in this setting with multiple sentient species and a lot of megafauna all sharing a small space, but I enjoyed the series and the characters. The conflicts worked for me as real problems that would be hard to solve.
Legend Quest: Masters of Myth - Middle grade cartoon series. I can't remember if I watched it on Netflix or on Disney+. A boy who can see ghosts has to travel the world (in a flying ship!) following clues and collecting plot coupons to try to stop the end of the world. It was fine. Not great and not bad.
A Letter to Momo - Momo's father has recently died, and she and her mother move back to the island where her mother grew up. Momo starts seeing creepy things that no one else notices and getting into trouble for what those creepy things are doing. Most of the action of the movie is her trying to keep the trio of monsters/spirits in check. They're not actively malicious but are selfish and hungry and not all that bright. They also clearly have a connection to Momo's dead father. This reminded me of My Neighbor, Totoro in some ways, but it's if Totoro wasn't quite so clearly benevolent.
Limitless season 1 partial - I strongly disliked the protagonist and lost patience midway through the season. He was such a manchild that I couldn't sympathize with his problems.
Lucy Worsley's 12 Days of Tudor Christmas - Includes re-creations and discussions with experts on the Tudor period. There's a lot about why certain things were centered that we wouldn't consider important or that we'd consider off-putting. I was interested, but I wasn't enthralled.
Lupin III. The First - Lupin and company do a knockoff Indiana Jones plot with unsettling character animation. Apart from the animation, nothing was terribly bad; it just was extremely predictable.
Masterpieces of the Imaginative Mind - Great Courses. 24 lecture series by Professor Eric Rabkin. Rabkin's courses were very popular at the University of Michigan when I was an undergraduate. I never took one, but I had friends how did, and I was curious as to how he was as a lecturer. The answer is that he's excellent as a lecturer but that his interpretations are all Freudian bullshit (with a little Jung thrown in) with Euro-centric fairy tale symbolism and patterns taken as world wide universal human truths. He was vastly entertaining, but I also wanted him to take something after the 1980s into account. Arguing with him might have been fun, but I'd have hated to be graded on topics upon which we disagree vehemently.
The No.1 Ladies' Detective Agency - Rewatch. I still enjoyed the acting and writing and still wish therewere a second season.
Searching - I was a bit unsure about the gimmick of this movie-- all of the footage being through computer/cell phone interfaces with the actors never directly on camera-- but it works really well. John Cho stars as a father whose teenage daughter has gone missing. He's desperately combing through her social media on the laptop she left behind in order to figure out what happened to her.
Secret Magic Control Agency - Disney+ movie. Gretel is a magic cop, and Hansel, her brother, is a conman. Together, they save the world. It was fine as background noise.
Superman: Doomsday - I didn't like the shape of the faces here, and the voices sounded wrong (which mostly means I'm used to other versions).
Teen Titans Go! Holiday Collection - I had already seen most of these, possibly all of them. The DVD collects 9 holiday episodes and runs less than 2 hours (which is about the limit of how much Teen Titans Go! I can handle at one go while still mostly enjoying it). The show still kind of amazes me with the characters feel almost like the serious versions; they're recognizable (and not just because of the voice actors) while still going to ridiculous extremes of behavior and bad decisions.
Tomb Raider (2019) - I didn't pay vast amounts of attention to this as it ran due to many of the action scenes being too much for my eyes and brain to follow, and I spent a lot of my time thinking that most of the characters were TSTL. It was just never the logic issues that bothered me that resulted in the characters dying. And I spent a lot of time thinking about the financial and logistical issues surrounding a seven year archaeological dig. That's a lot of money and a lot of bother for an extremely uncertain return. The fact that I was thinking about that during an action movie rather than worrying about the protagonist (or even liking the protagonist) says bad things about how the movie worked for me.
Upside-Down Magic - Disney+ movie. Magical school movie that looks like it might (potentially) have sequels. The protagonist's magic doesn't work the same way that most people's does, and the school administration firmly believes that magic like that has to be forced to wither lest it let Evil into the world. I don't think the plot arc will surprise any adult. I just feel like the decades of magically destroyed people deserve acknowledgment, compensation, something.
Wonder Woman 1984 - There were a lot of loose ends in terms of how the plot played out. Why this person had that item or knew that bit of information or wanted that thing was just kind of floating, unsupported, in handwave territory. It's not enough to put the gun on the mantel in act one if there's no reason for either the gun or the mantel to be there. The movie was pretty and well acted; it just wasn't solid all the way through.
Started but not finished:
Hero Quest - DNF. Animated kids' movie with no captioning. Possibly this wouldn't have been as terrible with captioning letting me understand the dialogue, but I'm not convinced. A boy goes on a quest to find the Wizard (not of Oz) and picks up companions on the way. I couldn't follow most of the audio.
The History of Ancient Egypt - Great Courses lecture series by Bob Brier. DNF. I only got through the first DVD (out of eight). I stopped because I kept wanting to heckle the lecturer for being Wrong.
Spellbound - DNF. No captions and the psychology and misogyny in the first 10 minutes bounced me hard.
Titan AE - DNF. I couldn't look at the screen for more than a second or two without starting to feel a headache. I let the movie run for a while without trying to watch directly, and spot checks showed no improvement. I couldn't follow the story just by listening.
Bill & Ted Face the Music - This was okay. It's been a long time since Scott and I watched the original movies, and they were never great favorites of ours. I enjoyed the ridiculousness of the characters' efforts to find a shortcut (or any path at all) to saving the universe.
Books that Have Made History: Books that Can Change Your Life - Great Courses lecture series by Professor J. Rufus Fears. The lecturer is a great performer in the tent revival preacher sense, but there's a skew to the lectures that makes me think he's probably perpetually puzzled by why his most promising students become fascists.
A Cat in Paris - Animated in a style I dislike. About an hour long. Story of a widowed cop, her daughter, a gentleman catburglar, a bunch of nastier crooks, and a cat.
Charlie's Angels (2019) - I had more fun with this than I really expected that I would. The whole thing with me not being able to follow action scenes makes a lot of movies much more difficult than they used to be. I'll look away, so as not to get sick, and get distracted and discover that I've missed 5-10 minutes and a chunk of plot/characterization that I really needed (on top of what I already miss because it's in the middle of migraine territory).
The Cold Blue - This is a documentary about WWII bomber crews in Europe. It includes comments from the few survivors who were still alive when the documentary was made (the library lists it as released in 2019). Scott is very interested in planes and in aviation history. I don't think that he saw much that was new to him, apart from the clips of the veterans one of whom showed equipment he'd brought home after the war. The person doing the filming mentioned that all of that is still property of the US government, and the old guy laughed. I learned a bit, but I also wasn't paying close attention, so there might well have been stuff I missed. My grandfather, my mother's father, was in the Army Air Corps and trained as a bomber pilot. I don't think he ever flew a combat mission, but he was drafted for Korea as a flight instructor.
Digging for Britain season 1 - No captions so I lost some details. Season 1 has four episodes. Archaeology in Great Britain, aimed at a general audience. This was fine but not a show I'll seek out again.
The Emperors of Rome - Great Courses lecture series by Professor Garrett G. Fagan of Pennsylvania State University. This was covering material I know well enough to find completely familiar but not well enough to be able to explain myself. The lecturer has a bit of a stutter but is clearly experienced and knowledgeable. I enjoyed the series.
The History of Spain: Land on a Crossroad - Great Courses. 24 lectures by Professor Emerita Joyce Salisbury of the University of Wisconsin, Green Bay. This was fine, not great, not terrible, and not (as far as I could tell) inaccurate.
Kipo and the Age of the Wonderbeasts seasons 1-3 - Middle grade cartoon series. I have no idea how the ecosystems work in this setting with multiple sentient species and a lot of megafauna all sharing a small space, but I enjoyed the series and the characters. The conflicts worked for me as real problems that would be hard to solve.
Legend Quest: Masters of Myth - Middle grade cartoon series. I can't remember if I watched it on Netflix or on Disney+. A boy who can see ghosts has to travel the world (in a flying ship!) following clues and collecting plot coupons to try to stop the end of the world. It was fine. Not great and not bad.
A Letter to Momo - Momo's father has recently died, and she and her mother move back to the island where her mother grew up. Momo starts seeing creepy things that no one else notices and getting into trouble for what those creepy things are doing. Most of the action of the movie is her trying to keep the trio of monsters/spirits in check. They're not actively malicious but are selfish and hungry and not all that bright. They also clearly have a connection to Momo's dead father. This reminded me of My Neighbor, Totoro in some ways, but it's if Totoro wasn't quite so clearly benevolent.
Limitless season 1 partial - I strongly disliked the protagonist and lost patience midway through the season. He was such a manchild that I couldn't sympathize with his problems.
Lucy Worsley's 12 Days of Tudor Christmas - Includes re-creations and discussions with experts on the Tudor period. There's a lot about why certain things were centered that we wouldn't consider important or that we'd consider off-putting. I was interested, but I wasn't enthralled.
Lupin III. The First - Lupin and company do a knockoff Indiana Jones plot with unsettling character animation. Apart from the animation, nothing was terribly bad; it just was extremely predictable.
Masterpieces of the Imaginative Mind - Great Courses. 24 lecture series by Professor Eric Rabkin. Rabkin's courses were very popular at the University of Michigan when I was an undergraduate. I never took one, but I had friends how did, and I was curious as to how he was as a lecturer. The answer is that he's excellent as a lecturer but that his interpretations are all Freudian bullshit (with a little Jung thrown in) with Euro-centric fairy tale symbolism and patterns taken as world wide universal human truths. He was vastly entertaining, but I also wanted him to take something after the 1980s into account. Arguing with him might have been fun, but I'd have hated to be graded on topics upon which we disagree vehemently.
The No.1 Ladies' Detective Agency - Rewatch. I still enjoyed the acting and writing and still wish therewere a second season.
Searching - I was a bit unsure about the gimmick of this movie-- all of the footage being through computer/cell phone interfaces with the actors never directly on camera-- but it works really well. John Cho stars as a father whose teenage daughter has gone missing. He's desperately combing through her social media on the laptop she left behind in order to figure out what happened to her.
Secret Magic Control Agency - Disney+ movie. Gretel is a magic cop, and Hansel, her brother, is a conman. Together, they save the world. It was fine as background noise.
Superman: Doomsday - I didn't like the shape of the faces here, and the voices sounded wrong (which mostly means I'm used to other versions).
Teen Titans Go! Holiday Collection - I had already seen most of these, possibly all of them. The DVD collects 9 holiday episodes and runs less than 2 hours (which is about the limit of how much Teen Titans Go! I can handle at one go while still mostly enjoying it). The show still kind of amazes me with the characters feel almost like the serious versions; they're recognizable (and not just because of the voice actors) while still going to ridiculous extremes of behavior and bad decisions.
Tomb Raider (2019) - I didn't pay vast amounts of attention to this as it ran due to many of the action scenes being too much for my eyes and brain to follow, and I spent a lot of my time thinking that most of the characters were TSTL. It was just never the logic issues that bothered me that resulted in the characters dying. And I spent a lot of time thinking about the financial and logistical issues surrounding a seven year archaeological dig. That's a lot of money and a lot of bother for an extremely uncertain return. The fact that I was thinking about that during an action movie rather than worrying about the protagonist (or even liking the protagonist) says bad things about how the movie worked for me.
Upside-Down Magic - Disney+ movie. Magical school movie that looks like it might (potentially) have sequels. The protagonist's magic doesn't work the same way that most people's does, and the school administration firmly believes that magic like that has to be forced to wither lest it let Evil into the world. I don't think the plot arc will surprise any adult. I just feel like the decades of magically destroyed people deserve acknowledgment, compensation, something.
Wonder Woman 1984 - There were a lot of loose ends in terms of how the plot played out. Why this person had that item or knew that bit of information or wanted that thing was just kind of floating, unsupported, in handwave territory. It's not enough to put the gun on the mantel in act one if there's no reason for either the gun or the mantel to be there. The movie was pretty and well acted; it just wasn't solid all the way through.
Started but not finished:
Hero Quest - DNF. Animated kids' movie with no captioning. Possibly this wouldn't have been as terrible with captioning letting me understand the dialogue, but I'm not convinced. A boy goes on a quest to find the Wizard (not of Oz) and picks up companions on the way. I couldn't follow most of the audio.
The History of Ancient Egypt - Great Courses lecture series by Bob Brier. DNF. I only got through the first DVD (out of eight). I stopped because I kept wanting to heckle the lecturer for being Wrong.
Spellbound - DNF. No captions and the psychology and misogyny in the first 10 minutes bounced me hard.
Titan AE - DNF. I couldn't look at the screen for more than a second or two without starting to feel a headache. I let the movie run for a while without trying to watch directly, and spot checks showed no improvement. I couldn't follow the story just by listening.
no subject
no subject
I haven't had good luck with lecture series covering subjects beyond literature and history. I suspect that's me rather than those other courses being bad. I had trouble paying attention.