Not long ago we watched Somebody I Used To Know, an Amazon Prime film in which Alison Brie’s cat, Harry, attempts to extricate himself from various situations in which he is the recipient of unwanted attention. Oh and also some kind of human romantic comedy-drama type stuff happens I guess.
So, yes, we are still watching House. Given the number of episodes available, we’ll probably be watching it until late spring. And although I’ve editorialized about the improbability of House’s minions doing everything around the hospital, up to and including breaking & entering and digging up the buried corpses of deceased pets, I think that we have, at this point, encountered what must be the most unbelievable thing House has ever tried to get past us. Seriously, I mean, I’m always willing to suspend disbelief, but this time they just went too far. Once you see what I’m talking about, I’m sure you’ll agree.
As I’ve mentioned several times, for the last few months we’ve been watching the AMC series Mad Men, which has proven to be of Breaking Bad-level addictivity for my wife; and so I thought it might be fun to subject her to another piece of fiction set largely in and around the world of advertising, namely, the old Tom Hanks/Jackie Gleason film Nothing in Common:
So as I’ve mentioned once or twice, for a while now we’ve been watching Mad Men* streaming on AMC+. I haven’t done a “Not a Review” of it, mainly because it never puts my wife to sleep, barring extenuating circumstances, such as starting an episode right before bedtime (and even then she still might stay awake for it). This puts it right up there with Breaking Bad** and The Queen’s Gambit*** on the short list of “Shows That Never Put My Wife To Sleep”, but also leaves me with not much to write about it, since I, of course, don’t do actual reviews myself, on account of I like everything. Except August Rush.
So recently we watched the film Le Week-End, in which a very English and very bickering couple played by Jim Broadbent and Lindsay Duncan decide the take the train down to Paris for the weekend, as one is able to do when one lives in Europe, apparently.
Partway through the film they bump into Ian Malcolm Jeff Goldblum—forever known to my wife as “The Jurassic Park Guy“—who plays an old college friend of Jim Broadbent’s character who has now become a successful author. Jeff Goldblum invites the other two to a book launch party, or something, at his apartment, various things happen, and then, as Jim Broadbent and Lindsay Duncan were leaving the apartment at the end of the evening, I suddenly had to pause the video and back it up a little.
Wife: “What are you doing?” Me: “I think I spotted something.”
So recently we’ve been watching the dramedy series Dickinson on Apple TV+. Now, you may be saying to yourself, “Who subscribes to Apple TV+?!” The answer is, nobody; like virtually everyone else who has it, we got a free subscription to Apple TV+ when we purchased some Apple gear last year. Since then, Apple has continually extended the free subscription period, most likely in the hopes that viewers will eventually find a show to get hooked on and will ultimately pay for the service. If that was their plan, it seems to have succeeded, because my wife is most definitely hooked on Dickinson, which is a fictionalized account of the life of the poet Emily Dickinson. Maybe you’ve heard of her.
Ever since we got a good-sized television and a Netflix disc subscription, we haven’t been to a movie in the theaters. Not once. Not even for Avengers: Endgame*. But that’s okay, right? Because now it’s out on Blu-Ray and surely Netflix will have bought a zillion copies of it** so that everyone who wants it can see it right away, right?
Because “Game of Thrones” is only available on disc from Netflix, the arrival of new episodes is subject to the vagaries of timing and the postal service, which means that there are occasions when no “GoT” is available. I’ve tried to fill those gaps with streaming series, without much success so far.
This week I’m reading Rebecca, the classic novel by Daphne du Maurier, in which a very young (and apparently nameless) narrator is swept off her feet by the dashing Maxim de Winter, quickly marries him, and goes off to live with him in his vast estate, Manderley, where it seems that―much like in the American South―the past is never really dead, and isn’t even past.