*** Archer (season 1)
* Afro-Samurai
** The Tick
*** The Fellowship of the Ring
*** Cowboy Bebop (episodes 1-5)
* Dr. Who
** MI:5
**** Black Swan
Remember Coach McGuirk from Home Movies? Well the same guy voices the title character in Archer, and the show is sort of like Coach McGuirk becomes a much better-looking international spy. So the result is pretty funny. I’m looking forward to the next season.
Afro-samurai is such a dumb-sounding name (and looked so ridiculous, like a parody of a stereotype) I figured it had to be pretty good or it would have been laughed out of town. But I couldn’t get very far into it. Maybe it is pretty good, but it just seemed like a parody of anime combined with a parody of blaxploitation, but taken seriously. Not good.
The tick was sort of funny but just… I don’t know, I wasn’t in the mood for that brand of goofy (and its low-budget bad-actingness), so I didn’t continue beyond a couple episodes.
For some reason, I got a craving to watch The Fellowship of the Ring again. And again, it was a fun adventure but my god some of the acting (hi, Gimli). And then there’s Hugo Weaving as Elrond; at the time, The Matrix was pretty recent and it was hard to see him as anything other than Agent Smith, which was just not right. Well, almost ten years later, he still just isn’t right. And then there’s my favorite, the chubby elf (Haldir, I think). The elfy hair just does not look good on a pasty, chubby man. I think since the third movie came out, the tendency has been to see these as some kind of modern epic classic, but I think, on the whole, they’re just what they are: big hollywood action movies. Enjoyable, but pretty quickly forgettable as soon as you leave the theater, without a whole lot you need to chew over in your mind. That about describes how I feel about the books, I suppose (one of the main things worth chewing over being the exact nature of Tolkien’s views on gender, race, and good/evil) , though I know some people think otherwise.
I first watched the whole Cowboy Bebop a few years ago, after hearing how great it was. I enjoyed it but was not blown away. Recently, I read most of the Overthinking It series on Cowboy Bebop (plug: I love Overthinking It), which made me want to re-watch the whole thing with my new deeper Overthought understanding. And this time around… I enjoyed it but was not blown away. Bebop is good and interesting and well done, and there are many things about it to enjoy or appreciate. Stokes’s articles rightly point out a number of those things; but most of what he focuses on were less things to be directly enjoyed than things to chew over afterwards. I might enjoy debating the meaning of Bebop with others who were watching them, but I watched them alone, and they didn’t end up adding a whole lot to my watching experience. Perhaps if I had literally studied them right before watching, but I don’t watch movies in order to have additional homework. This is not a knock on Stokes and Overthinking It: I literally enjoyed reading his articles more than I did watching the actual show (again, this is why I plug Overthinking It). But I did not feel like going through Bebop again and gave up after a couple of discs.
E and I decided to try out the recent Doctor Who reboot and did not get very far into it before deciding it looked awful and we couldn’t bear to go on. Deliberate or not, it seemed to exactly reproduce the cheap & cheezy feel of the original, and I don’t have enough nostalgia for the original that that interests me. MI:5 also failed to win us over. We might give it another shot, since people say it’s so good, but the first episode at least just was not that interesting and we were not particularly interested in sticking around to see what these people did next.
I’m not even going to try and review Black Swan much, beyond saying that E and I both thought it was terrific. I know some people think it was awful and some think it was glorious camp and unintentionally funny, and many don’t particularly like Aronofsky’s work (I liked Pi, but hated Requiem so much I hadn’t seen any more of his movies until now). There’s no question it was melodrama, but the thing about good melodrama is that if you accept it and enter its world, it can be very compelling. I entered Black Swan’s world completely and found it “holy shit!” worthy.