Another week’s started, which must mean another week ended. What have I been up to, media-wise?
Well, I’m still in the Dungeon Crawler Carl series for books. Just finished This Inevitable Ruin this morning and started book 8, Parade of Horribles. Still enjoying them, and not really much to add in the reading area.
For movies and TV, I’ve been a bit more diverse. We finished Spider-Noir on Prime Video, and the whole family enjoyed it from start to finish. (Though I will say it had some pretty . . . inventive violence in that last episode that we weren’t really prepared for. Still a lot of fun to watch Nicolas Cage do his Spider-man thing. In many ways, it felt like he got more and more bizarre as the series progressed. There were some good laughs toward the end, as well. It definitely gets the Bryce stamp of approval.
We watched an episode of Community (the one where they try to attract a rich student) and I watched various World Cup games. (Thoughts on the last US game: I was disappointed to see the team end with what felt like a whimper, and I honestly feel like Trump’s meddling in the red card situation contributed to that. It would have been better for the team to feel like they were in a hard spot and had to play their hearts out. Instead, the narrative of it was more that Belgium was in that position, and they played like it. But whatever.) We also watched the second episode of Maximum Pleasure Guaranteed. Still riveting, but we’re not devouring it. I think that’s more because the show is really uncomfortable to watch. Better in small doses. Plus, Denisa’s super busy right now taking a class for her ESL teaching certification, so it’s not like there’s been a lot of spare time for us to watch together.
That means I had more time to watch movies, though. Old Henry on Netflix was a great surprise. It was a western I hadn’t heard of, and I’m a sucker for a western. Well filmed and acted, and it had a great final act. A widower raising his son alone comes across a wounded man and a bag full of cash. Against his better judgement, he takes them both back to his house. Drama and action ensue. If you like westerns too, check it out.
They Will Kill You is billed as a horror/comedy on HBO/Max. It was more horror than comedy. A woman checks into a clearly evil hotel for unknown reasons. Guess what? Everyone in the hotel wants to kill her. She doesn’t want to die. Pretty grisly. It was fine, but not spectacular.
I revisited the first two John Wick movies and enjoyed them both. Very stylish action films, and it surprised me once again how easy the film made it to root for Wick on very little back story. (His wife died of cancer and someone killed the puppy she gave him as a last gift before she passed. As vengeance for this, he kills 77 people in the first movie. I’m not quite sure that equation balances out, though it was a very cute puppy. Of course, in the second movie he kills 128 people when someone forces him to kill one of his friends. (Don’t give IOU blood markers to psychopaths, people.) I think I’ll watch the third movie tonight . . .
How about you? See or read anything you’d recommend this week?