2023 in movies and series
31 Dec 2023 10:26 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
firecatThis is a dump of most of what I watched this year, with brief comments/reviews. If you consumed any of these I’d enjoy it if you told me what you thought (positive or negative). If you want me to say anything more about them let me know!
20,000 species of bees
Part of Frameline queer film festival. Lucía is an eight-year-old AMAB girl. During a summer in a village house linked to beekeeping, she explores her femininity. The film and the actress who played Lucia won tons of awards. Filmed in Basque country.
2010
Released in 1984. It's not at all like 2001. Ebert: “once we have freed 2010 of the comparisons with Kubrick's masterpiece, what we are left with is a good-looking, sharp-edged, entertaining, exciting space opera”. I didn't like it as much as him but that mostly sums it up.
7 Women & a Murder
Released in 2021. Italian language comedy mystery. Pretty to look at and I loved all the performances. However, despite having an entirely female cast (except for one tiny role), it only scarcely passes the Bechdel Test. Which is a shame or an achievement or a sly joke, depending on how you look at it.
A Man Called Otto
Released in 2022. About a guy whose wife died and he wants to kill himself now, but he gets involved in his neighbors' lives instead. It was well done but given my losses the past few years I found it painful to watch.
Amadeus
Originally released in 1984. I watched the Director’s cut this time. It has a plot point where Salieri solicits Constanze that wasn’t in the original. That plot point changes the subtext of certain other scenes. I really enjoyed rewatching it. The performances and the music and the sets and costumes are just delicious.
Trivia: When shooting the scene in which Salieri is writing down the death mass under Mozart's dictation, Tom Hulce was deliberately skipping lines to confuse F. Murray Abraham. // Neville Marriner agreed to do the project on the proviso that not one note of Mozart's music be changed // The bit part of the wig salesperson was played by the actual hair and makeup assistant for the shoot
Annihilation
Released in 2018. It has eerieness and awe and psychedelia that evokes 2001 and some of the other sf films I like. It’s also got some similarity to Stanilaw Lem’s Solaris, insofar as a very alien intelligence is trying to understand humans by mimicking/becoming them/getting inside their heads.
Babylon 5 The Road Home
2023 animated film. I’m a big B5 fan, and I was entertained. There was a lot of fan service. But the animation style sucked. The voices of characters whose original actors have died didn’t sound right (especially Delenn). Sheridan didn’t look right. (The other characters looked OK.) The plot was interesting (Sheridan keeps getting time-jumped around the multiverse) but it had a trite payoff. JMS was completely self-indulgent with Zathras. I say this as someone who loves Zathras.
Le Beau Mec
Means “the handsome dude.” Part of Frameline queer film festival. Restored old French gay men’s porn from 1979. Supposedly “Lost for decades before a print was discovered in an Alabama garage…” I cut my teeth on 70s porn (I know, “ouch”) and found it pretty hot, take that for what you will. Stars Karl Forest, includes uncredited contributions from two of director Potts’ paramours: choreography by Rudolf Nureyev and camerawork by cinematographer Néstor Almendros (Days of Heaven; The Blue Lagoon).
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
2022. I watched it mostly out of a wanting a sense of completion. I am glad I watched it but I didn’t think it was a particularly great movie. However, the eye candy was really amazing.
Eye on the Guy: Alan B. Stone & the Age of Beefcake
2006. Documentary offered by Frameline about Montreal’s physique photography scene, a gay subculture of the 1950s–60s. Alan B. Stone, one of its principal artists, was a mild-mannered fat man with a disability. The film pities him a little too much but not as badly as it might have. Eye candy!
Glass Onion
I loved this. I liked it a bit more than the original in the series, Knives Out. Janelle Monae was a big part of the reason.
Some trivia:
-Final film of Angela Lansbury. Angela Lansbury's username is "MSheSolved". Sondheim got Lansbury to cameo in this film
-One of the pieces on display is a crystal version of the statuette from The Maltese Falcon
-Apple does not allow villains to be shown using their products, which for those in the know eliminates two characters as murder suspects.
-Hugh Grant was asked about his cameo, and his reply was, "It is true, I'm married to James Bond."
Kedi
Utterly charming documentary about cats in Istanbul where cats, their caretakers, their neighborhoods, and Istanbul itself are all characters. If you like cats you need to see this.
Knives Out
Loved the slyness and the old-timey murder mystery atmosphere.
Luther: The Fallen Son
2023, Idris Elba reprises role from TV show Luther. He has good chemistry with his retired boss, who reminds me of le Carré’s Smiley. There was no gratuitous romance, yay. Door left open for Luther to become a secret agent.
M Is For Mothers
2023. Part of Frameline queer film festival. Brazilian lesbian couple conceive via IGF. Some interesting biology geeking, and it was enjoyable to see a lesbian couple who didn’t experience much homophobia.
The Maltese Falcon
1941. Rewatch for fanfic purposes.
Trivia: # Three of the statuettes still exist. Each is now worth more than three times what the film cost to make. # Etymology of "gunsel" (from the OED): “in his novel The Maltese Falcon (1929). Hammett found gunsel in a dictionary, where it was euphemistically glossed as ‘a boy hired for immoral purposes’, and decided to use it in a context where the meaning was not clear, in order to play a prank on the prudish editor of his novel. Subsequent authors began to use it to mean ‘gunman’ in their own pulp fiction.”
The Man from U.N.C.L.E.
Released in 2015. Stars Henry Cavill, has Elizabeth Debicki, Hugh Grant. Stylish, campy. Pretty good chemistry between the protagonists. Consciously shippy.
Interesting trivia: # Cavill “admitted that he was relieved to not have a shirtless scene in this movie # The TV series was partially developed by Ian Fleming — Napoleon Solo is in Goldfinger.
The Mandela Effect
Released in 2019. Title is about a name given to a phenomenon of mass false memories, e.g., many people believe the Monopoly man has a monocle. The movie was pretty bad, but I like the idea.
Nimona
2023. Animated film about a shapeshifting little girl and am aspiring knight, who is the first commoner who will be allowed to become a knight. The knight has a boyfriend. RuPaul plays one of the knights. Diverse cast. I enjoyed it.
Old Narcissus
2023. Part of Frameline queer film festival. I really liked this. It addressed hard issues (aging, being without a traditional family) but in a gently sweet way. I liked that the age gap relationship wasn’t held up as some kind of horror trope.
The Quick and the Dead
Released in 1995. Western w/Sharon Stone, Leonardo DiCaprio, Russell Crowe, and Gene Hackman. Parts of it aged very badly (Mexican and Native American stereotypes), but I enjoyed it. Trivia: Sharon Stone's leather jacket was over 100 years old and from a Western museum. Sharon Stone hand-picked Russell Crowe to be in this film. Crowe was a complete unknown to American audiences at this time.
The Perfect Find
Released in 2023. Age gap (older woman younger man) romance set in NYC fashion world. Directed by a Black woman, cast almost entirely Black. Predictable romance plot, the fashion is amazing, the cast of women bffs exuberant, there are some models who aren’t skinny. DB Woodside (who played Amenadiel on Lucifer) plays the main character’s ex, who turns out not evil.
Risen
Released in 2021. Slow-paced kind of a downer of an sf film about a meteor that hits a small town and produces toxic vapor. All the residents die. Then some of them come halfway back from the dead. Then a seedling that appeared in the middle of the meteor crater and grows into something that looks like the Sydney opera house…if you like the weirder end of the horror-sf genre you’d probably like this.
The School for Good and Evil
Released in 2022. Fairy tale movie. Has Michelle Yeoh, the woman who starred in Scandal, Laurence Fishburne, and Kit Young (from Shadow & Bone). They blew off the opportunity to make it queer-friendly. It was kind of pretty to look at, though.
Three Thousand Years of Longing
Released in 2022. Based on the short story "The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye" by A. S. Byatt. Tilda Swinton studies mythology and storytelling. Idris Elba is a djinn. Lush and beautiful with interesting cinematography that’s kind of like a dance performance. There’s an unlikeable character who’s described as having a “fetish” for very big women. It sucks that it’s called a fetish, but the scenes with him (he is also fat) surrounded by his harem of naked very fat women were really hot in my opinion.
1899
Netflix. From the makers of Dark. A cruise ship is carrying a lot of passengers who are traveling for different reasons, then it gets lost in the ocean and apparently-supernatural things start happening. The ending is stupid and is probably why it was canceled after one season. But if you like this sort of historical-eerie show, it has its interesting moments
American Gods
I loved most of this show. The first two seasons adhere pretty closely to the book and get through about half of it. Then Season 3 is mostly fanfic rather than following the plot of the book. But it works. However, it ends on an annoying cliffhanger.
Babylon Berlin
Set in Berlin just prior to and during Hitler's rise to power. I loved the first 3 seasons (28 eps). Very interesting characters, queer content, feels authentic… Season 4 came out in Germany, but Netflix apparently decided not to offer it, and I haven’t tried to track it down.
Bridgerton
Period drama series created by Chris Van Dusen and produced by Shonda Rhimes. Based on Julia Quinn's novels set in Regency London, but it's an AU where Black people are part of the aristocracy (more than they were in real life), and it's deliberately not historically accurate in some other ways. It's deliciously tropey, if you don’t mind watching characters you're rooting for make stupid decisions. I didn’t like the A story arcs in either season but there are a lot of interesting side stories and characters, and the setup where it’s narrated by an anonymous gossip-sheet writer is fun.
Carnival Row
Amazon Prime. Set in a fantasy world that’s sort of like 19th century London with faeries and other supernatural beings, who are oppressed by the humans. Mostly revolves around a half-fae police detective. Some really interesting characters. Gritty.
Evil
I haven’t finished this but I’m enjoying it so far. A skeptic, expert witness shrink works with a priest-in-training (Mike Colter, aka Luke Cage) to assess whether weird shit happening to various people is psychological in origin or involves demonic possessions. Michael Emerson (Harold Finch in Person of Interest) has an enormous amount of fun playing a psychopath who possibly has supernatural powers. It’s keeping me guessing, I never know where it’s going to go next, which when you’ve been watching tv for 60 years is rare and I like it.
The Fades
British supernatural/horror show about evil incorporeal entities who start to come to earth and possess bodies. Tom Ellis (Lucifer) has a supporting role. Ended on a cliffhanger.
The Fall of the House of Usher
Miniseries with lots of Poe references about a family that got rich off the pharmaceutical industry, making an addictive drug (thinly veiled reference to the OxyContin scandal). The patriarch’s whole family dies within a two-week period (this is not a spoiler) in Poe-like ways, and each episode is focused on one family member. Lots of gore, violence, screaming fights, and broken glass. A mysterious woman named Verna, which could be an anagram. Mark Hamill plays a great lawyer/fixer character. Actors from iZombie play a couple of roles. I absolutely loved this. It does a great job of walking the line between serious and campy. It’s also chock full of crossover potential (Lucifer, The Sandman, Constantine, Dark City…)
Flashforward
2009 series about FBI agents trying to figure out why there was a worldwide loss of consciousness in which almost everyone saw 2 minutes of their future on a particular day. Canceled after 1 season. There were some interesting subplots, but because nothing’s resolved I wouldn’t recommend it.
Good Omens
Amazon series based on the book by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. David Tennant and Michael Sheen play the main characters and have terrific chemistry. I think it works best when they both play it 95% straight. But overall it’s one of those comedies that is extremely silly and is also trying to make you feel real feelings and send important messages. S1 stands alone. S2 ends on a heartbreaking cliffhanger, but it’s been renewed for a third season.
Heartstopper
Romantic comedy about a gay teen boy and his group of friends (some of whom are queer and trans) and his boyfriend. Aimed at teens and also at queer grandparents who want their teen grandkids to have it easier than they did. (At least that’s how I feel when I watch it, although I don’t have grandkids.)
The Law According to Lidia Poët
Period drama set in 19th Century Italy about a woman who has a law degree and tries to find ways to put it to use and there’s also intrigue. Based on a real person. I enjoyed the season I watched, not sure if it’s been renewed.
Loki
Series about a version of Loki who branches off after the events of the movie The Avengers. I liked the first season better after I watched it twice. I haven’t watched the second season twice yet but I expect I’ll feel the same way about it when I do. The payoff at the end of S2 was effing amazing.
Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power
Very lavish show set in Tolkien’s Second Age of Middle-Earth (between events of Simarillion and those of LOTR). Galadriel and Elrond and a wizard and a Dwarven king and Sauron in disguise and Númenor and “The Last Alliance of Elves & Men” and Isildur and Hobbit-ancestors called Harfoots. My favorite is a dark character called Adar who is the creator/father of the race of Orcs. He’s played by Joseph Mawle in season 1 and I promptly ran off and added all his other appearances to my watch list, which means I started watching Game of Thrones after successfully avoiding it for 12 years (sigh). The character is going to be played by a different actor in season 2.
Lupin
Stars Omar Sy. About a family in Paris where the Lupin (gentleman thief) books get passed down from father to son. Very chewy and fun, fantastic competence porn, lots of shippy potential, all the seasons were tight with satisfying endings.
Moon Knight
Marvel/Disney show about a guy who has multiple personalities, one of whom is a vassal of the Egyptian god of the moon. Oscar Isaaaaaac, mmm…but I’ve watched it twice and I still don’t really understand what’s happening…
Mr Robot
2015 show about a guy who we slowly figure out has DID, who’s a cyber hacker and gets into a terrorist organization and also tries to fight criminals. Rami Malek & Christian Slater play 2 of the personalities. They both do a brilliant job. Four seasons. It dragged on way too long but most of the storylines and characters were interesting.
Nurse Jackie
Medical sitcom, starts out like a slightly more comic and less earnest version of ER updated for the 2010s. I liked the title character because she’s morally gray and unapologetic about it. The later seasons get darker and more repetitive and more focused in a moralistic way on the main character’s drug addiction, and I didn’t like that as much. Yes drugs can mess up people’s lives and are hard to stop, but I don’t watch sitcoms to be told that.
Our Flag Means Death
HBOMax weird pirate comedy-drama. Another in the genre of “very silly comedy that tries to make you feel real emotions” and it mostly works. Lots of canon queer content. Some marvelous characters and performances. I found the second season too chaotic and mean overall, but there were a few amazing payoffs, especially in episode 4 and the final episode.
Outer Range
Modern-day Western with time travel and a mysterious giant hole. So yeah that’s not very descriptive is it? But it’s the best I can do! It’s got lots of juicy Western tropes and atmosphere and I had fun writing the first story on AO3 for two of the characters.
The Peripheral
Based on William Gibson novel about a technology that allows a person from the past to visit the future via a video game type interface. Canceled after one season. Stylish. It wasn’t bad but I didn’t care about the characters as much as I would have preferred, so I ended up rooting for the villains. Would not recommend unless you’re a bigger Wm Gibson fan than me.
Poker Face
Peacock (NBC) series about a woman on the run from a gambling boss. She can sense when someone is lying and she goes around blundering into crimes and solving them. Pays homage to Columbo — she speaks in a husky voice and says stuff like “there’s something that’s bothering me”. Executive produced by Rian Johnson, creator of the Knives Out movie series, and it has the same styling and attention to detail and sly humor and diversity.
Ragnarok
Norwegian show set in modern times that borrows from Norse myth. Teen brothers start developing magical powers mapped onto Thor and Loki, and a rich family that runs an evil corporation is mapped to the Jotnar. The Jotnar family is very violent and sexy. The guy who plays Laurits(Loki) is an amazingly charismatic actor. The third / final season was a bit of a letdown. But overall I loved it a lot and it’s one of my favorite shows to write fanfic for.
The Repair Shop
British television series in which family heirlooms are restored for their owners by experts. It disappeared off Netflix and I couldn’t find it anywhere. I finally went to the trouble of getting a VPN and that allowed me to access BBC iPlayer so I can watch it. This fulfills a sort of AMSR role for me. It’s soothing and I really like watching people do restoration work.
Rush
2014 TV series that I watched because it stars Tom Ellis. “If Lucifer didn’t have supernatural powers and was an American concierge doctor who began to have a crisis of conscience.” Darker than Lucifer, but the rest is the same — lives in LA, drives a convertible sports car, rolls in money, does lots of drugs, fucks lots of women, has daddy issues and anger issues, has a Black sidekick. Ellis uses many of the same mannerisms in the two shows. Canceled on a cliffhanger after first season, but made this Lucifer/Ellis completionist happy.
Severance
Set in a world where at least one corporation creates a split between workers’ in-house memories and their outside-of-work memories, but some workers have leaks. Is of a piece with several other “weird-ass excessively secretive and controlling biotech corporation” series I’ve seen recently (Homecoming is another one).
Secret Invasion
Marvel miniseries about Nick Fury and the Skrulls, a shapeshifting species of aliens who have infiltrated most of the world’s governments and suddenly launch a coup. Predictable, but I enjoyed watching Samuel Jackson and Don Cheadle face off.
Shadow & Bone
2021 Netflix series based on the Grishaverse series of fantasy books by Leigh Bardugo. Similar to Carnival Row (regular humans vs powered people) but not gritty in the same ways. Lots of shippy potential.
She-Ra & the Princesses of Power
2018 animated series. Aimed at kids but held my interest too. Pretty to look at. Some queer content. Lots of focus on teamwork. I especially like the character Catra, a catgirl.
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds
Follows Captain Christopher Pike and the crew of the starship USS Enterprise during the decade before Star Trek: The Original Series. It has a lot of the energy of the original show but updated characters. A lot of shippy moments. Not gritty enough for my current tastes.
Suburban Shootout
Sitcom from 2006 about a small English town where there are two rival criminal gangs of housewives. The two Toms (Hiddleston and Ellis) are both in it. Ellis’s role is not interesting. Hiddles has a funny role as a naive young man, The single DVD available doesn't have all the eps but has a satisfying ending. I liked it better than I thought I would.
Survival of the Thickest
Sitcom. A 30s?-40s?-something fat Black woman who lives in NYC & works in fashion design makes romantic & career changes in her life. Most of the cast is Black. It’s explicitly fat-positive (mostly).
The Terror
2018 series. Historical/horror-supernatural. The horror comes both from human greed and depravity and from supernatural elements. First season is a fictionalized account of Captain Sir John Franklin's lost expedition to the Arctic from 1845 to 1848. Has Jared Harris (also in Carnival Row) as Captain Francis Crozier, Tobias Menzies (Brutus on Rome) as Commander James Fitzjames. Cornelius Hickey is an excellent Loki-type villain. Very gory. I really liked this a lot and I’m not sure why, although the many shippy moments are part of it.
Westworld
HBO original series based on movie about a theme park where the android hosts rebel against their human masters. Beautifully filmed. First season is riveting. Second season is confusing and attempts to be deep but just comes off seeming like a bunch of guys sitting around high on acid discussing the nature of reality. S1 is set mostly in a Wild West re-creation, other seasons in other settings. Tessa Thompson is a company exec.
Movies
20,000 species of bees
Part of Frameline queer film festival. Lucía is an eight-year-old AMAB girl. During a summer in a village house linked to beekeeping, she explores her femininity. The film and the actress who played Lucia won tons of awards. Filmed in Basque country.
2010
Released in 1984. It's not at all like 2001. Ebert: “once we have freed 2010 of the comparisons with Kubrick's masterpiece, what we are left with is a good-looking, sharp-edged, entertaining, exciting space opera”. I didn't like it as much as him but that mostly sums it up.
7 Women & a Murder
Released in 2021. Italian language comedy mystery. Pretty to look at and I loved all the performances. However, despite having an entirely female cast (except for one tiny role), it only scarcely passes the Bechdel Test. Which is a shame or an achievement or a sly joke, depending on how you look at it.
A Man Called Otto
Released in 2022. About a guy whose wife died and he wants to kill himself now, but he gets involved in his neighbors' lives instead. It was well done but given my losses the past few years I found it painful to watch.
Amadeus
Originally released in 1984. I watched the Director’s cut this time. It has a plot point where Salieri solicits Constanze that wasn’t in the original. That plot point changes the subtext of certain other scenes. I really enjoyed rewatching it. The performances and the music and the sets and costumes are just delicious.
Trivia: When shooting the scene in which Salieri is writing down the death mass under Mozart's dictation, Tom Hulce was deliberately skipping lines to confuse F. Murray Abraham. // Neville Marriner agreed to do the project on the proviso that not one note of Mozart's music be changed // The bit part of the wig salesperson was played by the actual hair and makeup assistant for the shoot
Annihilation
Released in 2018. It has eerieness and awe and psychedelia that evokes 2001 and some of the other sf films I like. It’s also got some similarity to Stanilaw Lem’s Solaris, insofar as a very alien intelligence is trying to understand humans by mimicking/becoming them/getting inside their heads.
Babylon 5 The Road Home
2023 animated film. I’m a big B5 fan, and I was entertained. There was a lot of fan service. But the animation style sucked. The voices of characters whose original actors have died didn’t sound right (especially Delenn). Sheridan didn’t look right. (The other characters looked OK.) The plot was interesting (Sheridan keeps getting time-jumped around the multiverse) but it had a trite payoff. JMS was completely self-indulgent with Zathras. I say this as someone who loves Zathras.
Le Beau Mec
Means “the handsome dude.” Part of Frameline queer film festival. Restored old French gay men’s porn from 1979. Supposedly “Lost for decades before a print was discovered in an Alabama garage…” I cut my teeth on 70s porn (I know, “ouch”) and found it pretty hot, take that for what you will. Stars Karl Forest, includes uncredited contributions from two of director Potts’ paramours: choreography by Rudolf Nureyev and camerawork by cinematographer Néstor Almendros (Days of Heaven; The Blue Lagoon).
Black Panther: Wakanda Forever
2022. I watched it mostly out of a wanting a sense of completion. I am glad I watched it but I didn’t think it was a particularly great movie. However, the eye candy was really amazing.
Eye on the Guy: Alan B. Stone & the Age of Beefcake
2006. Documentary offered by Frameline about Montreal’s physique photography scene, a gay subculture of the 1950s–60s. Alan B. Stone, one of its principal artists, was a mild-mannered fat man with a disability. The film pities him a little too much but not as badly as it might have. Eye candy!
Glass Onion
I loved this. I liked it a bit more than the original in the series, Knives Out. Janelle Monae was a big part of the reason.
Some trivia:
-Final film of Angela Lansbury. Angela Lansbury's username is "MSheSolved". Sondheim got Lansbury to cameo in this film
-One of the pieces on display is a crystal version of the statuette from The Maltese Falcon
-Apple does not allow villains to be shown using their products, which for those in the know eliminates two characters as murder suspects.
-Hugh Grant was asked about his cameo, and his reply was, "It is true, I'm married to James Bond."
Kedi
Utterly charming documentary about cats in Istanbul where cats, their caretakers, their neighborhoods, and Istanbul itself are all characters. If you like cats you need to see this.
Knives Out
Loved the slyness and the old-timey murder mystery atmosphere.
Luther: The Fallen Son
2023, Idris Elba reprises role from TV show Luther. He has good chemistry with his retired boss, who reminds me of le Carré’s Smiley. There was no gratuitous romance, yay. Door left open for Luther to become a secret agent.
M Is For Mothers
2023. Part of Frameline queer film festival. Brazilian lesbian couple conceive via IGF. Some interesting biology geeking, and it was enjoyable to see a lesbian couple who didn’t experience much homophobia.
The Maltese Falcon
1941. Rewatch for fanfic purposes.
Trivia: # Three of the statuettes still exist. Each is now worth more than three times what the film cost to make. # Etymology of "gunsel" (from the OED): “in his novel The Maltese Falcon (1929). Hammett found gunsel in a dictionary, where it was euphemistically glossed as ‘a boy hired for immoral purposes’, and decided to use it in a context where the meaning was not clear, in order to play a prank on the prudish editor of his novel. Subsequent authors began to use it to mean ‘gunman’ in their own pulp fiction.”
The Man from U.N.C.L.E.
Released in 2015. Stars Henry Cavill, has Elizabeth Debicki, Hugh Grant. Stylish, campy. Pretty good chemistry between the protagonists. Consciously shippy.
Interesting trivia: # Cavill “admitted that he was relieved to not have a shirtless scene in this movie # The TV series was partially developed by Ian Fleming — Napoleon Solo is in Goldfinger.
The Mandela Effect
Released in 2019. Title is about a name given to a phenomenon of mass false memories, e.g., many people believe the Monopoly man has a monocle. The movie was pretty bad, but I like the idea.
Nimona
2023. Animated film about a shapeshifting little girl and am aspiring knight, who is the first commoner who will be allowed to become a knight. The knight has a boyfriend. RuPaul plays one of the knights. Diverse cast. I enjoyed it.
Old Narcissus
2023. Part of Frameline queer film festival. I really liked this. It addressed hard issues (aging, being without a traditional family) but in a gently sweet way. I liked that the age gap relationship wasn’t held up as some kind of horror trope.
The Quick and the Dead
Released in 1995. Western w/Sharon Stone, Leonardo DiCaprio, Russell Crowe, and Gene Hackman. Parts of it aged very badly (Mexican and Native American stereotypes), but I enjoyed it. Trivia: Sharon Stone's leather jacket was over 100 years old and from a Western museum. Sharon Stone hand-picked Russell Crowe to be in this film. Crowe was a complete unknown to American audiences at this time.
The Perfect Find
Released in 2023. Age gap (older woman younger man) romance set in NYC fashion world. Directed by a Black woman, cast almost entirely Black. Predictable romance plot, the fashion is amazing, the cast of women bffs exuberant, there are some models who aren’t skinny. DB Woodside (who played Amenadiel on Lucifer) plays the main character’s ex, who turns out not evil.
Risen
Released in 2021. Slow-paced kind of a downer of an sf film about a meteor that hits a small town and produces toxic vapor. All the residents die. Then some of them come halfway back from the dead. Then a seedling that appeared in the middle of the meteor crater and grows into something that looks like the Sydney opera house…if you like the weirder end of the horror-sf genre you’d probably like this.
The School for Good and Evil
Released in 2022. Fairy tale movie. Has Michelle Yeoh, the woman who starred in Scandal, Laurence Fishburne, and Kit Young (from Shadow & Bone). They blew off the opportunity to make it queer-friendly. It was kind of pretty to look at, though.
Three Thousand Years of Longing
Released in 2022. Based on the short story "The Djinn in the Nightingale's Eye" by A. S. Byatt. Tilda Swinton studies mythology and storytelling. Idris Elba is a djinn. Lush and beautiful with interesting cinematography that’s kind of like a dance performance. There’s an unlikeable character who’s described as having a “fetish” for very big women. It sucks that it’s called a fetish, but the scenes with him (he is also fat) surrounded by his harem of naked very fat women were really hot in my opinion.
Series
1899
Netflix. From the makers of Dark. A cruise ship is carrying a lot of passengers who are traveling for different reasons, then it gets lost in the ocean and apparently-supernatural things start happening. The ending is stupid and is probably why it was canceled after one season. But if you like this sort of historical-eerie show, it has its interesting moments
American Gods
I loved most of this show. The first two seasons adhere pretty closely to the book and get through about half of it. Then Season 3 is mostly fanfic rather than following the plot of the book. But it works. However, it ends on an annoying cliffhanger.
Babylon Berlin
Set in Berlin just prior to and during Hitler's rise to power. I loved the first 3 seasons (28 eps). Very interesting characters, queer content, feels authentic… Season 4 came out in Germany, but Netflix apparently decided not to offer it, and I haven’t tried to track it down.
Bridgerton
Period drama series created by Chris Van Dusen and produced by Shonda Rhimes. Based on Julia Quinn's novels set in Regency London, but it's an AU where Black people are part of the aristocracy (more than they were in real life), and it's deliberately not historically accurate in some other ways. It's deliciously tropey, if you don’t mind watching characters you're rooting for make stupid decisions. I didn’t like the A story arcs in either season but there are a lot of interesting side stories and characters, and the setup where it’s narrated by an anonymous gossip-sheet writer is fun.
Carnival Row
Amazon Prime. Set in a fantasy world that’s sort of like 19th century London with faeries and other supernatural beings, who are oppressed by the humans. Mostly revolves around a half-fae police detective. Some really interesting characters. Gritty.
Evil
I haven’t finished this but I’m enjoying it so far. A skeptic, expert witness shrink works with a priest-in-training (Mike Colter, aka Luke Cage) to assess whether weird shit happening to various people is psychological in origin or involves demonic possessions. Michael Emerson (Harold Finch in Person of Interest) has an enormous amount of fun playing a psychopath who possibly has supernatural powers. It’s keeping me guessing, I never know where it’s going to go next, which when you’ve been watching tv for 60 years is rare and I like it.
The Fades
British supernatural/horror show about evil incorporeal entities who start to come to earth and possess bodies. Tom Ellis (Lucifer) has a supporting role. Ended on a cliffhanger.
The Fall of the House of Usher
Miniseries with lots of Poe references about a family that got rich off the pharmaceutical industry, making an addictive drug (thinly veiled reference to the OxyContin scandal). The patriarch’s whole family dies within a two-week period (this is not a spoiler) in Poe-like ways, and each episode is focused on one family member. Lots of gore, violence, screaming fights, and broken glass. A mysterious woman named Verna, which could be an anagram. Mark Hamill plays a great lawyer/fixer character. Actors from iZombie play a couple of roles. I absolutely loved this. It does a great job of walking the line between serious and campy. It’s also chock full of crossover potential (Lucifer, The Sandman, Constantine, Dark City…)
Flashforward
2009 series about FBI agents trying to figure out why there was a worldwide loss of consciousness in which almost everyone saw 2 minutes of their future on a particular day. Canceled after 1 season. There were some interesting subplots, but because nothing’s resolved I wouldn’t recommend it.
Good Omens
Amazon series based on the book by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. David Tennant and Michael Sheen play the main characters and have terrific chemistry. I think it works best when they both play it 95% straight. But overall it’s one of those comedies that is extremely silly and is also trying to make you feel real feelings and send important messages. S1 stands alone. S2 ends on a heartbreaking cliffhanger, but it’s been renewed for a third season.
Heartstopper
Romantic comedy about a gay teen boy and his group of friends (some of whom are queer and trans) and his boyfriend. Aimed at teens and also at queer grandparents who want their teen grandkids to have it easier than they did. (At least that’s how I feel when I watch it, although I don’t have grandkids.)
The Law According to Lidia Poët
Period drama set in 19th Century Italy about a woman who has a law degree and tries to find ways to put it to use and there’s also intrigue. Based on a real person. I enjoyed the season I watched, not sure if it’s been renewed.
Loki
Series about a version of Loki who branches off after the events of the movie The Avengers. I liked the first season better after I watched it twice. I haven’t watched the second season twice yet but I expect I’ll feel the same way about it when I do. The payoff at the end of S2 was effing amazing.
Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power
Very lavish show set in Tolkien’s Second Age of Middle-Earth (between events of Simarillion and those of LOTR). Galadriel and Elrond and a wizard and a Dwarven king and Sauron in disguise and Númenor and “The Last Alliance of Elves & Men” and Isildur and Hobbit-ancestors called Harfoots. My favorite is a dark character called Adar who is the creator/father of the race of Orcs. He’s played by Joseph Mawle in season 1 and I promptly ran off and added all his other appearances to my watch list, which means I started watching Game of Thrones after successfully avoiding it for 12 years (sigh). The character is going to be played by a different actor in season 2.
Lupin
Stars Omar Sy. About a family in Paris where the Lupin (gentleman thief) books get passed down from father to son. Very chewy and fun, fantastic competence porn, lots of shippy potential, all the seasons were tight with satisfying endings.
Moon Knight
Marvel/Disney show about a guy who has multiple personalities, one of whom is a vassal of the Egyptian god of the moon. Oscar Isaaaaaac, mmm…but I’ve watched it twice and I still don’t really understand what’s happening…
Mr Robot
2015 show about a guy who we slowly figure out has DID, who’s a cyber hacker and gets into a terrorist organization and also tries to fight criminals. Rami Malek & Christian Slater play 2 of the personalities. They both do a brilliant job. Four seasons. It dragged on way too long but most of the storylines and characters were interesting.
Nurse Jackie
Medical sitcom, starts out like a slightly more comic and less earnest version of ER updated for the 2010s. I liked the title character because she’s morally gray and unapologetic about it. The later seasons get darker and more repetitive and more focused in a moralistic way on the main character’s drug addiction, and I didn’t like that as much. Yes drugs can mess up people’s lives and are hard to stop, but I don’t watch sitcoms to be told that.
Our Flag Means Death
HBOMax weird pirate comedy-drama. Another in the genre of “very silly comedy that tries to make you feel real emotions” and it mostly works. Lots of canon queer content. Some marvelous characters and performances. I found the second season too chaotic and mean overall, but there were a few amazing payoffs, especially in episode 4 and the final episode.
Outer Range
Modern-day Western with time travel and a mysterious giant hole. So yeah that’s not very descriptive is it? But it’s the best I can do! It’s got lots of juicy Western tropes and atmosphere and I had fun writing the first story on AO3 for two of the characters.
The Peripheral
Based on William Gibson novel about a technology that allows a person from the past to visit the future via a video game type interface. Canceled after one season. Stylish. It wasn’t bad but I didn’t care about the characters as much as I would have preferred, so I ended up rooting for the villains. Would not recommend unless you’re a bigger Wm Gibson fan than me.
Poker Face
Peacock (NBC) series about a woman on the run from a gambling boss. She can sense when someone is lying and she goes around blundering into crimes and solving them. Pays homage to Columbo — she speaks in a husky voice and says stuff like “there’s something that’s bothering me”. Executive produced by Rian Johnson, creator of the Knives Out movie series, and it has the same styling and attention to detail and sly humor and diversity.
Ragnarok
Norwegian show set in modern times that borrows from Norse myth. Teen brothers start developing magical powers mapped onto Thor and Loki, and a rich family that runs an evil corporation is mapped to the Jotnar. The Jotnar family is very violent and sexy. The guy who plays Laurits(Loki) is an amazingly charismatic actor. The third / final season was a bit of a letdown. But overall I loved it a lot and it’s one of my favorite shows to write fanfic for.
The Repair Shop
British television series in which family heirlooms are restored for their owners by experts. It disappeared off Netflix and I couldn’t find it anywhere. I finally went to the trouble of getting a VPN and that allowed me to access BBC iPlayer so I can watch it. This fulfills a sort of AMSR role for me. It’s soothing and I really like watching people do restoration work.
Rush
2014 TV series that I watched because it stars Tom Ellis. “If Lucifer didn’t have supernatural powers and was an American concierge doctor who began to have a crisis of conscience.” Darker than Lucifer, but the rest is the same — lives in LA, drives a convertible sports car, rolls in money, does lots of drugs, fucks lots of women, has daddy issues and anger issues, has a Black sidekick. Ellis uses many of the same mannerisms in the two shows. Canceled on a cliffhanger after first season, but made this Lucifer/Ellis completionist happy.
Severance
Set in a world where at least one corporation creates a split between workers’ in-house memories and their outside-of-work memories, but some workers have leaks. Is of a piece with several other “weird-ass excessively secretive and controlling biotech corporation” series I’ve seen recently (Homecoming is another one).
Secret Invasion
Marvel miniseries about Nick Fury and the Skrulls, a shapeshifting species of aliens who have infiltrated most of the world’s governments and suddenly launch a coup. Predictable, but I enjoyed watching Samuel Jackson and Don Cheadle face off.
Shadow & Bone
2021 Netflix series based on the Grishaverse series of fantasy books by Leigh Bardugo. Similar to Carnival Row (regular humans vs powered people) but not gritty in the same ways. Lots of shippy potential.
She-Ra & the Princesses of Power
2018 animated series. Aimed at kids but held my interest too. Pretty to look at. Some queer content. Lots of focus on teamwork. I especially like the character Catra, a catgirl.
Star Trek: Strange New Worlds
Follows Captain Christopher Pike and the crew of the starship USS Enterprise during the decade before Star Trek: The Original Series. It has a lot of the energy of the original show but updated characters. A lot of shippy moments. Not gritty enough for my current tastes.
Suburban Shootout
Sitcom from 2006 about a small English town where there are two rival criminal gangs of housewives. The two Toms (Hiddleston and Ellis) are both in it. Ellis’s role is not interesting. Hiddles has a funny role as a naive young man, The single DVD available doesn't have all the eps but has a satisfying ending. I liked it better than I thought I would.
Survival of the Thickest
Sitcom. A 30s?-40s?-something fat Black woman who lives in NYC & works in fashion design makes romantic & career changes in her life. Most of the cast is Black. It’s explicitly fat-positive (mostly).
The Terror
2018 series. Historical/horror-supernatural. The horror comes both from human greed and depravity and from supernatural elements. First season is a fictionalized account of Captain Sir John Franklin's lost expedition to the Arctic from 1845 to 1848. Has Jared Harris (also in Carnival Row) as Captain Francis Crozier, Tobias Menzies (Brutus on Rome) as Commander James Fitzjames. Cornelius Hickey is an excellent Loki-type villain. Very gory. I really liked this a lot and I’m not sure why, although the many shippy moments are part of it.
Westworld
HBO original series based on movie about a theme park where the android hosts rebel against their human masters. Beautifully filmed. First season is riveting. Second season is confusing and attempts to be deep but just comes off seeming like a bunch of guys sitting around high on acid discussing the nature of reality. S1 is set mostly in a Wild West re-creation, other seasons in other settings. Tessa Thompson is a company exec.
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Date: 31 Dec 2023 07:45 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 1 Jan 2024 01:10 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 31 Dec 2023 07:58 pm (UTC)Ha! Same, honestly. But it was fun and I may watch it again.
Have you ever seen the series Legion? That is a really wild ride. I will never figure out everything that is happening there.
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Date: 1 Jan 2024 01:14 am (UTC)I haven’t seen Legion! And “can’t figure out what’s going on”/unreliable narrator is not one of my favorite genres, but that might change next week…
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Date: 1 Jan 2024 01:29 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 1 Jan 2024 11:26 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 1 Jan 2024 11:29 pm (UTC)