Tag: Netflix

TV and Stuff

There’s a new episode of WandaVision out. I haven’t watched it. Hopefully later tonight. We’ll see how the time works out.

I just finished my pointless rewatch of The Flash. That show comes back soon. The Walking Dead comes back soon. There’s a new Superman show on CW that premiers this week. That could hold us over until Supergirl comes back, but the idea of Superman as a dad to two teenagers… I don’t know about that. Batwoman is back, but they are already rebooting and it’s only season two. Season one was okay, but was it good enough to justify coming back after rebooting? I don’t know. I haven’t watched any of season two yet. That might be a clue as to how interested I am.

What shows should I hyper focus on for the next stretch of Covid lockdown?

I heard Resident Alien was good. I might check that out. I never got around to the second season of Altered Carbon, so that’s a possibility. I hear The Expanse and Snowpiercer are good. Handmaid’s Tale is a possibility. I was afraid to watch that during Trump because it felt too close to home. It still does, but maybe I should try it? Ozark? Breaking Bad? Lost? Mindhunter?

I don’t know… WandaVision, The Flash, and The Walking Dead (along with Falcon and Winter Soldier, once WandaVision ends) are a lot. They should be enough. They don’t give me the option of putting it on Netflix and letting it run all day while I do other things though. Unless I start The Walking Dead from the beginning, the way I just did with The Flash. Maybe.

Maybe I’ll just put The Mandalorian on and let it run on a loop 24 hours a day. That’ll work.

Why is Cobra Kai Good?

I’ll try not to include spoilers but no promises. If you are planning to watch the show but haven’t gotten around to it, you might want to be safe and stop reading now.

You have been warned.

Jen and I had a discussion this morning about Cobra Kai the TV series. Specifically, why is it good? When the show was first announced I, like many people, assumed it was going to be a spoof based on some jokes in the show How I Met Your Mother (one of the characters insisted that The Karate Kid was a story of a wholesome rich kid who got screwed out of his karate title and his girlfriend by the new bully in town). It’s not though. It’s just a continuation of the Karate Kid story (not you, Next Karate Kid). Johnny has grown up to be a loser. Daniel has grown up to be successful with a happy family. Johnny meets a nerd and decides to teach him karate and three seasons worth of bloody hijinks ensues.

If you look at it objectively and break it down into its core pieces, is it good? The acting isn’t terrible. Some of the kids are hard to watch but for the most part it’s okay. No one in The Karate Kid was getting a best actor award, and we’re pretty much on par with that today. The writing is pretty suspect. The boss fights in the season two and three finales were gratuitous to say the least (especially season two) and could have made the same points with 75% less violence. Granted, gratuitous does not necessarily mean bad. The dialog is often funny, but the overall story is completely telegraphed. You can literally see what’s coming multiple episodes ahead. I know surprise twists aren’t really the point here, but still… You could see the dramatic ending of season three happening during season one. It’s that predictable. Of course, that didn’t mean there wasn’t literal cheering in our living room when then dramatic ending to season three happened.

The show is 100% nostalgia and fan service. Seriously, there is nothing else here. Even that is hard to understand though. I saw the Karate Kid in the theater in 1984. I was 13. It never ranked as a favorite for me, not even close, but I liked it. It was fun. When the sequel came out I saw that in the theater too. Not so much for part three. I still don’t think I’ve seen that at all. That could explain why I like the show. It’s bringing me back to a simpler, more innocent time yadda yadda yadda. I can get behind that, but how does that explain my 18 year old step son? He loves it! He sat there cheering along with the rest of us. It’s not nostalgic for him, so where is his pre-existing emotional connection?

So the question remains? Why is Cobra Kai so good? Why have we hung on every shot for three seasons? Why are we all bummed out that we have to wait until next January for season four? How did they do this to us? They pulled a fast one on us and I want to know what happened. Was it hypnotism? Was it brain washing?

Why is Cobra Kai so damned good?

Quarantine TV Update

Thanks to 50/90 and the return of some pro sports, my quarantined TV watching has fallen off the cliff. At least prior to this past weekend.

The second season of The Umbrella Academy came out. I liked the first season, so I popped on the first episode. It started with a quick recap of season one. While watching that I had two thoughts. The first was, wow, I had kinda forgotten a lot of this. The second was, wow, that season might have been a whole ton better than I remembered, and I did really like it.

I was planning to watch one episode, and spread the season out for a couple of weeks. Nope. Once I started watching I was hooked and couldn’t stop. I started the season on Saturday and finished it on Monday. Yikes. It was so good.

Prior to the start of 50/90 I started watching The Watchmen on HBO. I was only a couple of episodes in, but I was enjoying it quite a bit. I started up again last night. The second season of The Boys is coming on Amazon in a few weeks. I’ll be jumping back into that. I’ve also been picking my way through a Rick and Morty rewatch. When I’ve got 25 minutes or so to kill before work I’ll watch an episode. I’m in season two. I just watched the Unity episode where Rick creates a life form just to test out his chosen method of suicide. Is that the most colossally depressing thing you’ve ever seen or what? The show is so good.

Then there is the 800 pound gorilla in the streaming television room…. The Handmaids Tale. It’s out there. Its supposed to be amazingly good. I want to watch it. I haven’t watched it yet because I am afraid of it. I know it’s going to hit too close to home. I don’t want to find out how that show is going to make me feel.

That and sports. There’s a Bruins game at 4:00 today. I have a meeting at 4:00 today. Damn it.

Defenders

 

I was talking about this with Mike the Bass Player at the gig.  We feel like, after the awesomeness of 2 seasons of Daredevil, and Jessica Jones, and Luke Cage, that maybe the reason the Iron Fist season was only so-so (by comparison) was because they rushed through it to get to The Defenders mini-series.

That’s fine by me!

Greatest Invention Ever

The new Netflix ‘skip opening credits’ function is the single greatest invention in the history of the human race.  No exceptions.

The wheel
Sliced bread
The moon landing

…and now this.

Humanity effin’ rules.

So Much for That

I told myself that I was going to keep this new account clean.  I was going to start from scratch and forget about past stuff.  Then I was poking around the settings page and saw that they had a function for importing Medium blogs.  I didn’t know that WordPress could do that.  So I popped over to Medium and found the export function and then popped back to WordPress and imported it.  So much for a clean start.  If I was going to do that, then I had to pull in the last WordPress account too, and that account includes all of the Blogger posts and a bunch of Myspace posts too.  It took a while, and a lot of it is littered with broken image links (thanks a ton, Posterous) but it’s all here.  Again, so much for a clean start.

So it’s St Patrick’s Day.  Are you having a Happy St Patrick’s Day?  My go to line is always that I don’t have to wear green because my red hair is proof enough of my Irishness.  Har har har very funny.  I don’t drink, so I don’t really celebrate outside of eating some boiled dinner.  Corned Beef and Cabbage, hold the cabbage please.  Today though, I did something fitting.  Netflix released the new Marvel series, Iron Fist.  The traffic was light enough that I got into work over an hour early, so I watched the first episode on my iPhone while sitting in the car.  The jury is still out on the show.  I don’t really like marshal arts stories.  This feels like that kind of thing after one hour.  The interesting thing though was when I went looking for podcasts that cover the show and found one that seems to cover all of the Defenders series.  They published an episode today that discussed the first episode of Iron Fist.  That was exactly what I wanted for my evening commute.  The cool thing?  It was three Irish guys.  They wished us all a happy St Patrick’s Day.

My wife and my step daughter are going to the movies tomorrow.  My step son and I are on our own for the afternoon.  We have to come up with something interesting to do.  I have no ideas at this point.  I’d be up for an Avengers movie fest, but we should do something that doesn’t involve melting our brains in front of the tube.  I’ll let you know what we come up with.

Practice Time

Just getting ready to go to band practice. We’re going to be short a singer tonight (he’s in Chicago… I still think we should try rehearsing over skype) so the focus is on tightening up the rest of us.

The downside for me right now is that I am exhausted to the point of distraction. I took a shower today at about 11:30 and ever since I sat down to tie my shoes following that shower I have been on the verge of sleep. I went out to run some errands and that was okay, but as soon as I got home I just wanted to sleep. I expect that this will carry over to practice tonight and I will suck something fierce.

13 days to our next gig. I am going to do a lot of practicing at home. Probably going to be noodling on the guitar while watching TV with the kids after work and stuff. I will be ready when the time comes. Hell, I’m almost ready right now. Just not tonight… Urgh. Is it bed time?

On a related note, my wife and I started binge watching The Man in the High Castle last night. After practice we expect to have enough time to watch two more episodes before we have to give up and go to bed…

We have three episodes left.

Nooooooooo!!!!!

An Idiot Abroad

Jen and I were feeling like today should be the kind of day where we just lazily sit on the couch and watch the boob toob. Neither of us has any interest in the super bowl so we just popped over to Netflix to see what was what.

We stumbled upon the show An Idiot Abroad. We thought we’d give it a shot. What the hell, if it sucked then we put something else on. 44 minutes later we had both laughed our butts off and we’ve since plowed through two more episodes. Damn that is a funny show.

Silverlight?

Netflix runs on Microsoft Silverlight? Who knew! Almost as surprising as me being able to install the Silverlight plugin on a Mac.

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So are you kids sick of the camera+ app’s HDR filter yet? Are you sick of me starting sentences with the word so?