2020 February
-
2020 Movies update: 7 movies watched in Feb. Probably the best movie I've seen this month was Knives Out. (Jojo Rabbit close second.) The goal of 200 movies for the year is getting farther! As for TV, I think most of my watching time was spent rewatching Rick and Morty for quiz purposes lol. Well, Criminal Minds ended, so there's that. Arrowverse has been meh, though I did enjoy Supergirl's 100th episode. Hm, I guess I haven't actually watched a lot of stuff in the past month. There's a ton of stuff that I've been wanting to watch but haven't
-
In 2010 I took a short work hiatus which meant I was often home for most of the day. Back then Netflix wasn't really a thing, so I would often have local cable TV playing in the background of whatever I was doing. And it was because of this that I started regularly watching police procedurals. They're not the cleverest or most highbrow of shows, but they're more like a guilty pleasure. Most of it was NCIS, which the cable channels loved showing for some reason, but during that time I also picked up other shows like the quirky Bones
2020 January
-
I wasn't sure if I should continue this watching-lately series since I already set up a separate page for listing my 2020 movies watched. It might have been more consistent to have a list for the 2020 TV shows also? But then again, TV shows are a much different beast, since each show/season is broken into an episode and sometimes you watch them all in one go or sometimes over the span of a few months. So maybe let's keep this going for the while. So yeah, movies. From the list for January, I think the best one was Parasite.
2019 December
-
Been watching a lot of things this December. I finally got back on The Expanse after finishing S1 more than a year ago. I only finished S2, but it was already a vast improvement over S1. S1 felt like a lot of meandering around until the characters actually ran into the plot. S2 was stronger, faster-paced, and there's always a lot of things going on in each episode. I really like this series now, looking forward to S3 and S4 when I have the time. Netflix-wise, I enjoyed their recently-added Jeopardy series (always a great show to have playing in
-
I watched the most recent Star Wars last night. Spoiler-free review posted here. Since this ended the sequel trilogy and the entire "Skywalker Saga", I thought it deserved a bit more spoilery discussion.
2019 November
-
Nothing in the cinema this month (going to the cinema is expensive!). I did watch a couple of animated movies this month: Dragonball Super: Broly. I have some vague recollection of watching the original Broly movie, and I believe this one is much better. DBS Broly is a slightly more nuanced character than just "random raging monster" from the previous non-canon movie. The animation was okay, you could tell the animators were having fun with some of the battle parts. Also, I watched the English dub, and I just realized Goku's voice is super annoying, so I pity the Americans -
Actually watched something in the cinema this month: Joker. I wasn't originally sure if I wanted to see it, I wasn't hyped for it at all in the months prior. But as the showing date came nearer, there was a lot of buzz around it so I decided to go anyway. I don't feel like it lived up to the hype and the warnings about promoting incel stuff, but at least it's one of the higher-grossing DC movies, so maybe we'll have more to come in that vein. MCU movies all have kind of same-y tone and feel, so probably
2019 September
-
I finally got around to watching X-Men Dark Phoenix which I skipped when it came out mainly because (a) poor reviews, and while normally I'd have watched it anyway since I have not missed any of the X-Men movies in the cinema, not even the horrendous Wolverine Origins, there was also to consider that (b) I was in the US at the time and was only willing to spend my precious dollars on one expensive American cinema and Spider-man Far From Home won out. The movie wasn't that bad really, at least I felt better about it than the aforementioned
2019 August
-
Hmm, surprisingly I haven't watched too much stuff this month. Eigasai I watched a Japanese film at Eigasai in UP Diliman for the first time ever, upon the invite of some friends. We saw One Cut of the Dead a comedy zombie film. It was great and it was hilarious, although you must make sure not to lose patience with the first thirty minutes. I went in blind not knowing anything about it other than "Japanese comedy zombie movie", so you should too! Easily one of the funniest movies I've seen in recent years. Young Justice Back half of Young
2019 July
-
I was travelling for most of the past two months, so this covers both June and July, and I guess I haven't been able to watch too much. Maybe? IDK, we'll see. Since I was in the US, I took the opportunity to finish watching Voltron: Legendary Defender which only had two seasons available on PH Netflix. Pretty good adaptation, lots of fun callbacks to the old series. Some annoying filler eps, especially in the middle seasons onwards. I like how they spent the entire series going through the main Voltron villains one by one: first Zarkon, then Lotor, then
2019 May
-
The big TV thing of May 2019 was of course, the much maligned finale for Game of Thrones. I've written about that separately here. Most of the US TV series also ended their runs in May. Arrowverse show seasons were littered with poor writing as usual. I rank the seasons in this order: best is Legends of Tomorrow season 4. The reason Legends is the best is that they're not afraid to be outrageous. My favorite moment was from before the midseason break, Puppets of Tomorrow! second best is Supergirl season 4. I don't like that Supergirl always felt very
-
After a much-maligned eighth and final season, HBO's Game of Thrones is done. Unmarked spoilers follow. The eighth season was so notoriously bad, we got petitions asking for rewrites. Here's how I explained it to a friend after the notorious episode 5: It's not about characters being killed, it's about bad writing because they're cramming. The writers were determined to finish the show in 2 smaller seasons so they're skipping a lot of necessary character development and characters just do stupid things because the plot demands it. The most recent episode (spoilers follow, no apologies) has Dany do something really
-
Continuing with the Wheel of Time re-read! I devoured Eye of the World much more quickly than I expected, finishing the book in less than 3 days. It helps that I had already read it before of course, but I think there's also a part of me that enjoys escaping into this fantasy world when the real world outlook seems dire. Anyway, the book shows a lot of Tolkien-esque plot influence, especially near the start: Some kids from a backwater village are visited by a magic user and after some troubles are forced on the run from black riders? Sounds
-
Since I was going to be taking a long trip in a month, I was looking for some books to read on the plane and in airports and whatnot while waiting. I settled on a re-read of Robert Jordan's Wheel of Time series, a pretty good time for it since by next year we may have a TV series from Amazon (hopefully better than Game of Thrones). Side note: Wheel of Time is also why I'm not optimistic that GRRM can finish ASoIaF in just two more books - Jordan took forever and died before he could finish WoT and
2019 April
-
I've already written extensively about Avengers Endgame, but there are other things I watched this month too. Shazam came out early this month, and while it was unfortunately sandwiched between MCU blockbusters, it was a fun adventure romp and surprised me in a few ways. I wrote a short spoiler-free review over on Tumblr. TV-wise, I've been on a rewatch binge of 30 Rock that unfortunately started with season 4 due to Amazon Prime's weird way of presenting things. I've already blown past the series finale and wrapped around to the start and currently at season 2, so close to
-
I already wrote about Avengers Endgame a bit in yesterday's post, but that was a bit rushed and I had more thoughts, so here we are. I figured I might as well get everything out. There will be unmarked spoilers for Avengers Endgame and Agents of SHIELD. Before even going into the movie that was seemingly sold out everywhere despite being on almost every cinema screen in the Metro, I was thinking to myself what a phenomenon. Endgame is the culmination of a decade's worth of movies, 22 in total, and even some number of shows, something unrivalled in all
-
Two endgames to discuss in one post! MTG War of the Spark and Avengers Endgame spoilers ahoy! Endgame #1: War of the Spark The latest Magic set has been a home run in terms of lore and flavor and storytelling, bringing the last three years worth of MTG lore to its conclusion as the villainous dragon planeswalker Nicol Bolas aims to complete his plan to achieve omnipotence over the multiverse. The set is packed with planeswalkers summoned to Ravnica by Bolas's schemes, which means mechanically that a lot of new planeswalker design space is being explored. The spoiler season was -
I was struggling to remember the term - I knew there was one - for the type of stories where it's long-winded and the narrator is generally trying to keep the audience hanging and eventually ending in an anticlimax. These are called Shaggy Dog Stories, there's even a subreddit for them. The ones I heard the most growing up were from my high school crowd, and I remember two of them: the "bloop bloop". Basically, a kid is asked what he wants to do when he grows and he says "I want to invent the bloop-bloop!" and the story proceeds
-
Since I'm easily distracted, I often tumble down rabbit holes way too easily. You know the kind of rabbit holes I'm talking about: you just want to lookup the name of that actor who appeared in that movie and suddenly you find yourself forty minutes into a Wikipedia dive with three different tabs open, none of them remotely related to what you were originally searching for. (Wikipedia could also be IMDB, Reddit, or TV Tropes). There's also the rabbit holes of video games - I've probably spent like 20 hours over the long weekend picking up a 2017 save game
-
Many of the manga series I used to follow from long ago have since ended, the only ones still running now are One Piece and Hajime no Ippo. So I thought I'd follow some newer ones. Here are some short reviews: The Promised Neverland I picked up this one due to a strong recommendation from someone I follow on social media. The premise starts out with some super smart kids who grew up in an orphanage without any knowledge of an outside world. Suddenly they find out that not all is as it seems and that they are actually captives