P-p-p-p-preach!

The Boys S5 — 2.5/5

"On the other hand, the show is at its worst with everyone else, scrambling to find purpose when we only really care about the two people who will inevitably meet in the final issue to finish it off." And here we go, continuing to ride that train of thought. The show keeps trying to tell us Hughie is the central character and, sure, no offense to the boy, he's got a place here, but it's not his show. It is, as with every season, a show that belongs to Anthony Starr and Karl Urban who are so good at embodying the worst of us. Anthony Starr's Homelander and Urban's Billy Butcher go from defiance to evil to childlike to petulant to funny, turning on a knife's edge. They're every reason we fall in love with narcissistic people, because they are so charming and so compelling and that knife just hanging above our heads is so dangerously seductive, because surely it will fall on anyone but me. (They are the Chosen Ones, but at least they've chosen me to stand by their side.) Their smile is perilous. And so, finally, as foreordained, they meet in the end for an epic battle and... it's fine. This season should have been a downhill race to a conclusion but plot device after plot device, go here, do this, find that, oops find this other thing, oh hey there's a new character, created a circuitous path to its predestination. How exactly it would play out was left to be seen, but we all had a pretty good idea of how the final battle would go. But, unfortunately, it doesn't end with them. It keeps going, cooling down and then trying to heat the scene back up, but by then one half of the team was missing and it couldn't quite recover from that.  

Compared to my husband, he's nothing.

No Other Choice — 3/5

Had this been a tighter movie, it would have been a better movie. Asian Mads Mikkelsen is a surprisingly gifted comedic actor, but the beats play out for far too long. It's trying to be some version of 'madcap' but the added energy just slows things down. And so it fails to just be a fruitful "dark comedy." So more then is put on its psychological weight, and two interesting points that the movie makes, but points which start to push at each other: 1) capitalism will do us all in, but not before setting us against each other and 2) how we all just fall apart at the prospect of learning new skills and perhaps going down a rung in our class position. People are stubborn, and capitalism is destructive. I think the second point is easy to make, and I think the movie makes it easily and clearly and obviously. ("We fucked, fam.") The first point is more important, and harder to convey: we don't have to throw our bodies on the churning gears, but, when the hour strikes, we can choose to be nowhere near those gears. We have to lose something; but we may at least have a choice in what we lose. It's that choice to maintain what we've accumulated that fucks us in the ass. Anyway, I'm not even sure the movie was trying to make that point but I think that's the point that I would have liked it to make. 

I'm of the belief that certain people are cursed.

Euphoria S3 — 2.5/5

And thus ends what feels like a contractual obligation. Y'know, I never watched this thing for the story. It's a fun watch, and I think it's the closest perhaps we've gotten to a music-video-as-movie. It's full of color and music and standout images but never felt like it got lost in its art direction; it's vibes (and thus definitive of the late 2010s). It had extreme highs and extreme lows—you can't say it didn't swing for the fences! I appreciate that!! Now — which fence? And on what side? And in whose yard? Indeterminate. I think with this season, the show unfortunately will be remembered as a celebrity grab bag and 'a point in time' for a selection of famous actors and actresses. At some point during these episodes, I thought, cynically, that Sam Levine, former addict, was maybe making a point that though we look down on drug addicts, there are other addictions that we don't think as little of: addiction to attention, power, and class aren't nearly as bad. But do some heroin? Aw, man, ur fucked. I say I looked at this cynically because I think in that view it becomes a bit of "yOu dARe pOINt yoUr fiNgERs aT mE??" which is maybe unfair to him, I don't fucking know the guy. But then the last episode ends and nothing leading up to it really comes together to achieve epiphany, so it really ruins the opportunity to try to say all of it was about anything. The show ends with a showdown between two people we have not followed across multiple years. Fair enough—by this point, the rest of the cast had just became a bunch of people who used to share a space now leading scattered lives. They moved beyond the need for the show, so the show moved beyond a need for them.

Thats too stupid, isn't it?

Nirvanna The Band The Show The Movie — 4.5/5

What a fucking delight. The more I write about it, the more I'll remember it, and I'd rather just go in to my next viewing having forgotten my thoughts on this, so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ 

Shit, man, just reading the wiki on the filming of this thing is so fucking fun.