The ones who stayed.

Reservation Dogs S3 (but also the whole thing) — 4.5/5

And so ends the slow crawl from comedy to drama, and the path its drawn is beautiful and sweet and something I think, combined with things like Ted Lasso and Our Flag Means Death and The Bear, starts to approach again the new religion, the old religion, one called "all we have is each other." Believe in me as I in you and together we shall rise. If the first two seasons of Reservation Dogs were about escaping the bonds of where you're from, this final season 180s it—they searched for a larger world if only to say goodbye to it. "How beautiful to never search for who you are. Everything you need is here, in the millenniums of certainty." The trust in the aunties and uncles and shitasses and the ancestors, the spirits, that every step was a step forward, and in all the chaos of the universe, the random assortment of atoms traversing eternities, in life and death, they found each other, here, in this place, at this time. They came together. And then the hard part becomes staying together. Though some do leave, and maybe later even more will, I think this show ultimately does something which I'm not sure I've seen before—it celebrates the ones who stayed. The ones who make up the home you return to. The constants. Their small lives, infinite in size. The ones who believe in you, who collectively do their part to fill the god-sized hole inside you. The people in this show touches something in me. I will miss them now that they're gone, and I hope they come this way again. 

Children

are distant things.

Resentment is drinking poison

and expecting someone else to die.

— Geri Halliwell

How beautiful to never search for who you are. Everything you need is here.

In the millenniums of certainty.

— Bucky, Reservation Dogs, Season 3, Episode 5

I'm an idiot.

Shazam: Fury of the Gods — 2.5/5

I think it's better than the first one! Here is why: the movie's biggest problem is still Zachary Levi. Specifically, how he and his kid alter-ego are not actually anything alike. Captain Marvel is an 8-year old kid who wants friends and verbalizes it excessively, and Billy Batson is a moody too-cool-for-school teenager who wants friends but keeps it to himself (like any self-respecting teenager should). Everytime it switches between them, there's a huge shift in tone. What the movie gets right this time is essentially sidelining Billy to focus on Freddie—who, in another world, is a much better Billy Batson! But actually I'm thankful he's not because this means that Freddie can interact with Captain Marvel in ways that Billy never could. It feels like a kid interacting with that kid with superpowers. And so it's fun! And there's a stable tone throughout this thing. And I pretty much forget all the bits and pieces outside of that. Not sure if the other superhero family members actually did much? Except to serve a story about family that was mostly about two members of the family? Anyway, more fun was had. Huzzah. 

I just feel like you're pretending.

Honor Society — 2/5

I went into this hoping for two things — a clear successor to the easy likeability of 'Easy A,' and the ascendance of Angourie Rice, who I am fond of because 'The Nice Guys' continues to be one of my most rewatched modern movies, and I wish her to succeed outside of it. She does okay! The movie has a rhythm, it moves steadily forward, it has charms—but my god, is it so fucking grey. It's dreary. It's made in the few minutes between deluges of rain on either side of the scene. It makes any lightness sopping wet. And then a weird fucking sociopathic twist and a weird fucking creepy teacher thing. Somewhere in here is a brightly-colored movie, and a decent story about how the road to heaven may be paved with bad intentions, but it's lost in this fucking downpour.

Everyone’s gotten really good

at the same thing.

— Lorde

The truth wants to come out, and then there's a fear that it's going to destroy something.

Couples Therapy, S3 (but also S1 and S2) — 5/5

This may somehow end up being my favorite show of all time. If you don't know the premise, it's simple—couples go to a therapist to talk about their problems. The cameras are hidden; the therapy is taken seriously. Orna Guralnik looks at each of them, actively listening, and searching for what they're actually saying within the words they're actually using. She's a master molder, guiding the conversation, pushing them further, bringing them back. Making sure the other person is listening as well. And then the show wisely shows her own private sessions as she looks for advice from others as to how to meet these people. Wise, because it shows that this is a job that extends beyond her sessions. She can only help them if she can herself grow into what they need. I admire her. In some ways I aspire to be like her. Sometimes I, as the viewer, want her to jump up and shake these people and say "Don't you realize what you're doing?? Don't you understand what you are??" And to occasionally see her speak up and create clear boundaries is marvelous in its effectiveness, and its right-ness, though of course she can't just jump out of her chair to slap them across the face. So many of these people seem like they'd be so much happier if they just left each other, but that is not something she can say. Each episode is an entire movie, each of these couples' lives an entire universe, split into four 7-minute segments. I couldn't binge the show because each episode feels special, both because of the heaviness in each episode but also selfishly I wanted to drag it out as long as possible. Every entrance into these peoples' lives is something learned, something gained, something worth talking about. And when they succeed, you succeed with them. And when they fail, it's heartbreaking, but you also understand it needs to happen. Sometimes therapy is just building up the courage to say goodbye. Orna in that way is like an angel, guiding them to a set of doors and asking them which they want to open. She will take you as far as she can, but the final choice is yours. And in her way, in her responsiveness, she shows me a way to be, and still how much further there is to go.

And you will not know, until many years later—

or never at all. 

I have a specific definition of alive,

which is I want to feel like I am being changed.

— Jenny Odell

I'll be out your atmosphere.

They Cloned Tyrone — 4/5

What a lovely timelessness they've created. It's got a stuck-in-time-ness of those small towns that had a heyday and then industry left and what got left behind simply stopped moving. John Boyega plays it serious, straight out of the '90s, accompanied by Jamie Foxx's 70's-era pimp and Teyonah Parris' ho talking about blockchain. It's a composite town, a composite time, and it works marvelously; it all works as a purposeful aesthetic to the plot. It's a place built on the idea of what those places are, all these times still living together in a prism; a cage. It's an idea of a place you've likely never been. It's all green and grimy and filled with people who don't realize they're already dead. From that setting springs a super-fun plotline and a wonderful meshing of tones that doesn't quite come together at the end. It builds mystery and intrigue and a momentum that unfortunately gets dead-stopped by exposition. And not very clear exposition? I got confused. I'm not sure whether I needed this world to wrap itself into a neat little bow, or to just embrace the fun of it all and go with it, but it doesn't quite do either. But whatever—everything else is in this place is worth visiting again.

Think of only what is.

The Little Mermaid (2022) — 2.5/5

It's unfortunate that the movie wasn't better received because, while it's not great, it might also be the best of these live-action Disney things? (This of course excludes Cinderella which was genuinely good but somehow feels distant from all the ones between this and that?) It does the thing that those do which is to make a primarily beat-for-beat remake but make it 10x slower, but this one unlike those feels most like a cartoon. Halle isn't a great actress, but she's a great caricature. She's naive and innocent and bubbles. Melissa McCarthy and Awkwafina are already live-action cartoons and they're just left to do their thing—which is great. Let them do their thing. When you hire Maurice Chevalier, you are hiring him to be Maurice Chevalier. There are times this movie felt like the Disney live-action movies from the '60s, in their innocence and charm and slapdashery. But it's this fucking art direction house style of these live action monstrosities which bring it down. Every time it tries to feel real, it feels less authentic to the world. Straight up, serious question, why the fuck isn't a newt playing a flute nor a bass playing de brass? The visuals too often aim for beauty instead of fun. I do not care that you've brought the bottom of the ocean floor to life with photo-realism and many gigabytes of data and Intel processing power. I just want to watch the fluke as the duke of soul (yeah). It's not great, for all of the above reasons (and please god make these movies less than 2 hours long) but there's something in here that makes it better. And that includes continuing to cement Lin Manuel-Miranda as the heir apparent to Howard Ashman — 'The Scuttlebutt' is kind of a bop — though that also deserves criticism as his two other tracks are definitely not-a-bop. Not sure if that's as much a criticism of him as much as a lack of editing in a desire to sell the idea of EVEN MORE SONGS (ONLY $19.99). It would have been better if it had been smaller. Too bad it didn't do as well as all those others. A good lesson might have been learned. Then again, the lower expectations only help it. 

¯\ _(ツ)_/¯ 

My energy level

doesn't match this role.

— someone in a meeting

All I wanted was a measly sandwich.

Big Top Pee Wee – 1/5

This is bad, and surprising in just how much so. Pee Wee's not just a bad kid, but a bad person. It goes for drama without a deft hand to find the humor in it. It's got a big top circus full of people and still feels small. What kind of kid was I to find something good here? Maybe it was just on a lot. Maybe it was my first exposure to circus freaks, and that idea seemed wild. Maybe I was a dumb fucking kid.

The hard work

of living.