The month of April is here and we’re making our way through a few midseason finales, or shortened series finales, and waiting for some new things to start coming up to check out. We’re getting excited for what April has to offer as our HBO Max subscription continues to pay out well with Godzilla Vs King Kong and then get to finally see New Mutants and Mortal Kombat with its new film.
We’ve mostly whittled away our list of shows to watch in several of our streaming service queues so we’re definitely in a good place.
Current Netflix queue: I Am Woman, Rebecca, Cool Hand Luke, The Dig
HBO Max queue: David Bowie: The Last Five Years, Watchmen TV, Westworld S3, Game of Thrones S8
Hulu queue: Das Boot, Swing Things, I Kill Giants
A lot of what I worked on this past week were things that are just regular ongoings, such as the really fun season finale for Resident Alien to the latest installment of For All Mankind that has me on the edge of my seat. We’ve got the usual sitcoms that are just a part of my existence as well. But a few other things crept in as well.
As I’ve talked about before, I grew up on 80s coming of age movies and the comedies that came out of it, almost all of which have aged horribly. Same with 90s and the aughts as well. But each new decade produces more and they’re tackling things in a pretty fun way, trying to have it both ways sometimes while making it clear what’s bad. Moxie gives us a high school where the toxicity is pretty blatant – and it is like that in a lot of schools but not all schools – and a bit of inspiration from the past crops up on how to start pushing back on it. It’s an interesting look at the whole “It’s always been that way” thing when you’ve been in school with classmates for over a decade, you kind of get inured to a lot of crap and just wait for it to end. Directed by Amy Poehler who has a smaller role in it, it’s a fun piece overall that serves to push the power of change things even against the inertia of toxicity as it focuses on 16-year-old Vivian played by Hadly Robinson. She gets inspired by the new transfer student Lucy played by Alycia Pascual-Pena to not accept things as they are and try for change. It’s certainly familiar enough but it puts a lot of the problem on the adults in this as well for allowing it to happen, and rightly so. It’s not a great movie that’ll be hugely memorable but it was a fun romp as you want to see certain parties get their comeuppance.
I think I talked about this before but I wanted to again in case I didn’t because it was just so freaking excellent. The second season of A Discovery of Witches takes us back to the 1590s as they search for the book that the leads need and it’s a really strong romp through the time when one of them was previously alive as a vampire. There’s a lot of things going on here, including bringing the main couple closer together, but it also keeps events in the present moving forward as things are starting to get even tenser there. This was a fantastic season and I hope people check it out if they have Shudder or with the upcoming debut on AMC.
In catching up on older things that I’ve got in my collection that I’ve revisited while working while trying to avoid streaming so as to not use up my data cap, it’s an odd mix this week. Over the course of the week, I’ve background watched:
- The Music Man
- The Prince of Egypt
- Tron
- The Goonies
- The Lives of Others
- Urusei Yatsura OVAs 1-6
Movie reviews this year:
- Happy Happy Joy Joy: The Ren & Stimpy Story Review
- Kamp Koral: SpongeBob’s Under Years Preview
- Raya and the Last Dragon Review
- The SpongeBob Movie: Sponge on the Run Review
- The Little Things Review
- In Other Words Review
- Earwig and the Witch Review
What did you watch this past week?