Recent Netflixing et al.
Nov. 5th, 2022 10:11 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hrjLately I've gotten even more into a mood of "my brain can't cope with thinking once the dayjob is done" and I've been using Netflix and (yes, I capitulated) Amazon Prime Video as accompaniment to dinner and decompressing with online jigsaw and word puzzles. I find it relatively hard to "just watch" something and should really start a serious knitting project (one I can do without constantly looking at it) for reasons I will go into below.
So what have I been enjoying lately? I confess that I signed up for Amazon Video solely to watch The Rings of Power, which I very much enjoyed, particularly the multiply-threaded plot and the uncertainty of just who was who/what. I avoided spoilers and even avoided looking up the source material (probably an unnecessary avoidance) so I could enjoy the discovery aspect.
From here on in, I'm not going to specify which network I watched things on, because honestly I have a hard time keeping track if it's not in front of my eyes.
Loved, loved, loved A League of Their Own (the series). When I first saw haters posting "why is this slow all about lesbians I thought it was about baseball" I thought it was the typical over-reaction to any hint of queerness. No. They're right. This isn't a baseball show that happens to have some lesbian characters, it's a lesbian show that happens to revove around baseball. And I love it. So many different types of representation. Realistic (and sometimes hard to watch) while being overall positive and triumphant. I recognized the "big game climax twist" as borrowed from a (more modern) real life incident and thought it was perfect for the setting.
I've been watching The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and overall enjoying it, although my interest is straying now that I'm in...what?...season 3? 4? Lost track. (Amazon Prime is not as good as Netflix at keeping track of your place in a series.) I think the thing that keeps me going is the Unresolved Romantic Tension between the oblivious Mrs. Maisel and her butch-lesbian manager who clearly has utterly fallen for her.
This week I've been touting a somewhat cheesy fairy-tale/dark-academia movie, The School for Good and Evil, almost entirely for the way it centers intense platonic same-sex friendship. Let's just say that if you liked the resolution of my novella The Language of Roses, the resolution of this movie has a similar vibe.
I've been browsing through the Amazon catalog for interesting costume flicks but am running up against the problem (I mean, not a problem exactly, but an infelicity) that the initial splash page doesn't have an obvious indication of whether the show is non-English with subtitles. See my comment about using video as background when multi-tasking. If I have a knitting project I can enjoy things with subtitles, but I can't enjoy them if I'm noodling on my laptop doing visual things. Ever since my first winter working from home I've been thinking I need to knit myself some leg warmers. Maybe I'll finally go yarn shopping today...
Also recently watched the animated horror-adjacent social-activism movie Wendell & Wild. If you think you would enjoy a "Nightmare before Christmas" vibe with a wounded and rebellious Black teenager going up against Evil Corporation (tm), this is solidly for you. No cheaply easy resolutions, but lots of love.
And now, I need to Do The Thing I promised myself I'd do in exchange for a coffee shop morning: dealing with the fact that I haven't glanced at my email in-box for two days solid.
So what have I been enjoying lately? I confess that I signed up for Amazon Video solely to watch The Rings of Power, which I very much enjoyed, particularly the multiply-threaded plot and the uncertainty of just who was who/what. I avoided spoilers and even avoided looking up the source material (probably an unnecessary avoidance) so I could enjoy the discovery aspect.
From here on in, I'm not going to specify which network I watched things on, because honestly I have a hard time keeping track if it's not in front of my eyes.
Loved, loved, loved A League of Their Own (the series). When I first saw haters posting "why is this slow all about lesbians I thought it was about baseball" I thought it was the typical over-reaction to any hint of queerness. No. They're right. This isn't a baseball show that happens to have some lesbian characters, it's a lesbian show that happens to revove around baseball. And I love it. So many different types of representation. Realistic (and sometimes hard to watch) while being overall positive and triumphant. I recognized the "big game climax twist" as borrowed from a (more modern) real life incident and thought it was perfect for the setting.
I've been watching The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel and overall enjoying it, although my interest is straying now that I'm in...what?...season 3? 4? Lost track. (Amazon Prime is not as good as Netflix at keeping track of your place in a series.) I think the thing that keeps me going is the Unresolved Romantic Tension between the oblivious Mrs. Maisel and her butch-lesbian manager who clearly has utterly fallen for her.
This week I've been touting a somewhat cheesy fairy-tale/dark-academia movie, The School for Good and Evil, almost entirely for the way it centers intense platonic same-sex friendship. Let's just say that if you liked the resolution of my novella The Language of Roses, the resolution of this movie has a similar vibe.
I've been browsing through the Amazon catalog for interesting costume flicks but am running up against the problem (I mean, not a problem exactly, but an infelicity) that the initial splash page doesn't have an obvious indication of whether the show is non-English with subtitles. See my comment about using video as background when multi-tasking. If I have a knitting project I can enjoy things with subtitles, but I can't enjoy them if I'm noodling on my laptop doing visual things. Ever since my first winter working from home I've been thinking I need to knit myself some leg warmers. Maybe I'll finally go yarn shopping today...
Also recently watched the animated horror-adjacent social-activism movie Wendell & Wild. If you think you would enjoy a "Nightmare before Christmas" vibe with a wounded and rebellious Black teenager going up against Evil Corporation (tm), this is solidly for you. No cheaply easy resolutions, but lots of love.
And now, I need to Do The Thing I promised myself I'd do in exchange for a coffee shop morning: dealing with the fact that I haven't glanced at my email in-box for two days solid.
