2022 October
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I recently published a long-ish blog plost about the Hulk and New Mutants comics. And also I haven't watched any new movies lately, so I took the opportunity to knock a couple of related items off my "poorly-reviewed comic book movies" list. Hulk (2003) I wonder [what] Ang Lee [was thinking when he made a] Hulk [film]. "Ah, yes. I, critically acclaimed serious director Ang Lee, have something to say about the Hulk." a friend Eric Bana and Ang Lee's Hulk film honestly wasn't even that bad, though there are certainly some poor choices made in the film. I think
2022 March
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I keep shifting between writing individual posts per thing I want to review or doing one of these "Watching Lately" posts that consolidate several items at the same time. I guess when it's a number of "less important" films or shows it's okay to consolidate them together? But if it's something like The Batman or an MCU film which are generally bigger fandoms for me, then individual posts are ok, since I'll usually have a lot to say? IDK, I'm just making this all up as I go along. This one is the last two weeks worth of movies and
2021 July
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Some stuff I've watched lately. Spoilers for Gunpowder Milkshake and MotU: Revelation are marked. Casino Royale (2006) Bond film no. 21, and the first for Daniel Craig. The final era in this James Bond run, looking forward to it. Casino Royale is new to me, but I've seen two of Craig's Bond films, so I have an idea of what to expect: a more serious and much less campy James Bond, grim and determined. The tone here is much closer to Dalton's two films than any of the other runs. Since it's kind of a reboot, it takes place early
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I used to do these "Watching Lately" posts to talk about movies/tv/books I'd recently consumed, but for a while I folded up the reviews into the weeknotes and sometimes via short notes but the reviews have been getting longer so I guess I'm bring the "Watching Lately" tag and series of posts back. Die Another Day (2002) Bond film no. 20 and Brosnan's final appearance. The main question for me going in was: have I actually watched this before in the theatre? My memory says no, but this movie does have the ice palace scene I originally thought was in
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Warning: Spoilers for the just-ended season of Loki at the end of this. I have a spoiler-free review of that if you'd like. The World Is Not Enough (1999) Bond film no. 19 and Brosnan's third. Pretty sure I saw this in the theaters when it came out, but for the life of me could not recall any of the plot details at all. Turns out it was because the plot was a bit unnecessarily convoluted. It's easy to tell straight away that Sophie Marceau is on the bad guy side, given her henchmen, so that was no surprise. Renard
2020 March
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My COVID19 Diary is still ongoing, although that TOC is starting to get unwieldy. Need to think of a better UX solution for that. I know it's probably unrealistic, but I'm hoping the lockdown somehow gets lifted sooner rather than later. It's not that I crave social interaction (I don't), but I miss going out for food. I miss pizza. And japanese curry. And fancy sandwiches with sesame seeds and such. The food at the house is fine and all, but tends to get repetitive. And during the last grocery run, the only mayonnaise they had was Best Foods Mayo
2020 February
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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
2020 January
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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
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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
2019 November
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
2019 April
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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
2019 March
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The big one this month was Captain Marvel. I posted the usual spoiler-free review over on Tumblr, but I have some more spoiler-y thoughts over here: (Spoilers) Not much else to report. The Arrowverse is limping along. Recent episodes of Supergirl have been great, I loved Jon Cryer as Lex Luthor, and I love how they've been able to adapt multiple comic book storylines this season such as What's So Funny About Truth, Justice, & the American Way?, American Alien and Red Son. (Excuse me, red daughter.) In more sci-fi land, The Orville has been fantastic, with their surprise twist
2019 February
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Some things I've been watching lately, aside from the usual TV shows I follow: I watched Alita: Battle Angel, with the friend who introduced me to the series in the first place. The movie looked fantastic and the fight scenes were great. Plot was supercondensed, several books' worth of story combined into one. Ended in a weird place, kinda? Easily the best western live action anime adaptation by far. On Feb. 7, 2019, 10:06 p.m. I wrote: Watched Alita: Battle Angel earlier today. Pretty good. Fast pace, excellent visuals and fight scenes. They tried to cram a lot of the
2019 January
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Some things I've been watching lately, aside from the usual TV shows I follow: Bumblebee only came out over here in January (thanks to the usual MMFF shenanigans), and I decided to watch it on a whim. Pretty decent soft reboot, read my spoiler-free review over on the Tumblr The first half of Young Justice Outsiders is out, and it's pretty good. Focus is back on a smaller group after the larger team in YJ season 2. A few new characters are introduced and I learned about a couple of DC heroes I wasn't familiar with before. Probably still the
2018 December
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Some things I've been watching lately, aside from the usual TV shows I follow: I very much enjoyed Elseworlds, the Arrowverse crossover this year. I mean sure, a lot of it didn't make any sense, but it was like a love letter to DC fans. I actually consider myself more of a Marvel fan than DC, but I still loved it! I wrote a spoiler-free review over on the Tumblr. I found Better Call Saul on a couple of "Best TV of 2018" lists so I decided to catch up with it since it was on Netflix. I was actually