This was a much busier week from a media-watching perspective. Finished a book and watched a bunch of movies and episodes.
In the reading department, I finished A Trade of Blood, the new Ana and Din mystery installment from Robert Jackson Bennett. It’s the third in the series, and it just came out last month I believe. I really enjoy the way Bennett weaves the mystery elements in with the fantasy elements. I’m not sure there are many Epic Fantasy Mysteries out there (at least, I haven’t read any others), but Bennett does a great job making a case for why that genre should exist. As someone who’s a fan of epic fantasy and mysteries, these scratch both itches at the same time, and I’ll definitely continue to recommend the series to anyone.
In the realm of television, I watched a number of Survivor 50 episodes, which managed to actually be surprising at times. They promised twists, and there have been many different spins on tribal councils, which has managed to keep the season feeling somewhat fresh. (Though I continue to feel that the immunity challenges have grown stale. I get that there are only so many physical obstacles you can do on a remote island, but come on. “Balance this ball as long as you can.” “Stay on a board as long as you can.” “Swim, then dive through mud, then do this puzzle.” Can’t they come up with something new? Maybe they feel they don’t need to, since I’m still watching anyway?)
Denisa and I finished the first season of Interview with the Vampire. They certainly went for the full gore factor on the last episode, and I found the season . . . fine. It hasn’t really made me feel compelled to watch it, if that makes sense, but it also hasn’t been something I’ve wanted to give up on yet, either. I think the acting has been solid, the set design great, and the story execution just fine. We did watch the first episode of the second season, and I was sad to see Claudia get recast, but I think we’ll stick things out through the end. (It helps in this case that there aren’t a lot of them.) We’ll see how it goes.
I watched three movies this week, as well. First up was The Devil Wears Prada 2. Honestly, it wasn’t nearly as fun as the first one, but it was still good enough that I enjoyed myself. Some of that is that the first one had a much better thesis statement: fashion is important, even if people don’t think it is. For the sequel, that thesis statement was replaced by “reporting and magazines are important, even if people don’t think they are.” While that’s something I definitely agree with, the vehicle (fashion magazines) isn’t as strong of a platform to use to make the argument. I also felt like it was a series of stretches to get the characters from the first back into the same sort of positions they had been in before to make the sequel work. Again, I had a good time, but it’s probably more of a 7/10 from me.
Hoppers was Michaela’s choice for our Sunday movie. Pixar movies have fallen quite far down from their former standing in my eyes. Time was that any new Pixar film was something I really looked forward to. In some ways, this is the Wes Anderson effect for me. (I love Wes Anderson movies, but they also all feel so much like “Wes Anderson movies” that I stop really wanting to watch more of them, simply because it feels too much like I already know what I’m going to get when I watch them. Sort of like how if you have the same meal at the restaurant every time you go there, sooner or later you don’t really want to go there anymore, no matter how excellent that meal may be. I realize this is ironic to have this mindset when I eat almost exactly the same thing for breakfast every day, but here we are.) In any case, Pixar movies all started to feel the same to me. All well done. All heart warming. All with a theme of some sort. And eventually, I just lost interest in watching new ones. It wasn’t that I wouldn’t watch them. I just wasn’t curious to see what they were like. Hoppers definitely fits into that mold. Having seen it now, I think it’s around a 7/10 from me. It’s basically Avatar but for woodland creatures, and it’s funny and inventive in spots. I had a good time watching it, but I also don’t realistically see me watching it ever again.
And then you’ve got Temple of Doom, which we watched last night. The second Indiana Jones movies is infamous for being one of the films that spurred the PG-13 rating. It’s been a long while since I watched it, and I was surprised by how outlandish parts of it were. (People give Crystal Skull a hard time for the fridge scene. Have they not seen the “jump out of a plane in an inflatable raft” scene? Indy’s been doing unlikely stunts for a long long time. The action sequences in this movie are fantastic. The narrative tissue that connects all of that together? Not nearly as robust. The dialogue was especially bad in spots, or at least it hasn’t aged well. (And the constant “ewwww gross! Indian people eat gross food and are also maybe going to sacrifice people to their strange gods” vibe got more than a little tiresome.) But at the same time, so much of what the modern action/adventure movie is can be traced back to this series, and Temple of Doom was a step along the way. We’ve had 40 years to refine that since then, so it makes sense that it pales in comparison to some of the modern takes on it. Still, all that said, I continue to really like the franchise and the movie. I gave it an 8/10, realizing nostalgia might be painting that number a bit higher than it otherwise might be. I had a very good time in the film, despite its shortcomings.