So a few weeks ago I mentioned that my wife had been watching the Disney+ superhero series WandaVision with me. Sadly, this only lasted for the first three-and-a-half episodes; in episode four, the action shifted to what was going on outside of the retro, sometimes black-and-white world of Westview, starting off with … Oh, wait, hang on. For those who haven’t seen Infinity War and Endgame or, for that matter, all of WandaVision:
So recently, mainly as a result of a series of mixups about changing out hardware, we became aware that our local cable company had altered their pricing bundles:
Meaning that it was now possible to cancel the cable portion without having the price of the Internet and land line* portions jacked up so high that the price was basically the same as if we hadn’t canceled cable. Given that we don’t actually watch very much cable—many of the shows I used to watch, such as Into the Badlands and Preacher, have been canceled or died of natural causes, while others, such as Doctor Who, Resident Alien, and Battlebots, are on hiatus—we decided to go ahead and cut that particular cord, thus freeing up close to $200 a month. (Yes, I know, everyone else did this five or ten years ago.)
Continue reading “Not A Review Of “The Mandalorian” and “WandaVision””So over the last few weeks, with Dickinson between seasons, we’ve sort of been looking for some new programs to intersperse amongst the lighter Big Bang Theory and New Adventures of Old Christine fare—sitcoms that my wife likes to refer to as “dessert”. I had been hoping the new HBO series The Nevers would fit the bill:
Continue reading “Not a Review of “Mare of Easttown” and “Upload””Those who keep up on doings within the superhero film genre will no doubt be aware of the recently-released “Snyder Cut” of the 2017 film Justice League, which was supposed to be DC’s answer to Marvel’s The Avengers, but which bombed pretty badly with both critics and at the box office. Maybe it should have been phrased in the form of a question …
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.
So the perspicacious reader may have noticed that there hasn’t been a “Not a Review” post in a while. For the most part, this is because we have temporarily canceled our Netflix streaming and disc-by-mail accounts, in order to save a few bucks* a month. The streaming part, we canceled because there’s literally** nothing on Netflix that my wife wants to watch, while I’m all caught up on Dark and The Umbrella Academy and Kingdom, and who knows when Stranger Things is going to come back, and when I tried to watch Warrior Nun I quickly concluded that it was more or less a Buffy wannabe, plus I immediately (and correctly) guessed what the big twist was going to be; and as for the discs, well, when they arrive I put them on the fireplace mantel until we watch them, which can sometimes take over a week, depending, and I kind of got tired of having red envelopes up there glaring at me and saying “You’re spending $10 a month for me to be sitting up here doing nothing.” (Under other circumstances, when we were not home all the time, one could tend to forget that the disc was there waiting; now, not so much.)
Continue reading “Not a Review of “Adventures in Babysitting””While the COVID-19 pandemic has been raging on, we—like much of California—have been staying home pretty much all the time, as San Diego County’s numbers were not moving in a good direction for some weeks. Check it out: I’ve been keeping charts.
With our last couple of Netflix discs, we’ve been on a bit of an old movie kick ― “old” in this case meaning 1967 (the original version of Bedazzled*) and 1985 (Into the Night). No, not the series where the airplane is trying to avoid getting fried by the sun; the movie, where Jeff Goldblum and Michelle Pfeiffer are trying to avoid getting fried by the sun. Or something like that.
So the other week, we watched the DC Comics superhero film Suicide Squad:
So recently we finally watched Red Eye, Wes Craven’s romantic comedy in which Cillian Murphy and Rachel McAdams meet cute at an airport, have a nice little romance on the plane, and break up when they land, only to reconcile when Murphy realizes he can’t live without her and tracks her down at her father’s house to ask for his permission to marry her.
