Blogocentric Formulations

August 2023 Watch List

To qualify for my Watch List every month, the following has to be something that I've watched that's new to me. It doesn't necessarily have to be a current show, but it can't be reruns or rewatches of something I've already seen. So if I'm including it in this list, it means this month is the first time I've watched it. I'll put "DNF" (Did Not Finish) next to anything that I stopped watching and have no immediate plans to finish.


Movies

          The Amazing Maurice
          LEGO Disney Princess: The Castle Quest
          Mummies
          Spider-Man: Across the Spiderverse


Television

          Billions (Season 1)
          The Idol
          Jack Ryan (Season 4)


For movies last month, I really enjoyed Spider-Man: Across the Spiderverse. I thought it was a great sequel to the fantastic Spider-Man: Into the Spidervese and they managed to fit even more awesome references and jokes into this second installment. It was a ton of fun to watch. I wish I could say the same for the other three movies I watched this month, but all three of them were not great in their own ways. The Amazing Maurice was okay but a little boring (although I did love seeing Terry Pratchett's character of Death on screen!), Mummies was just plain lowest common denominator animation, and LEGO Disney Princess was cute, but not exactly my thing. I also just realized that the only movies I watched this month were kids' animation titles.

The television I watched last month was (mostly) good. I finally started watching Billions and really got into it. The two main characters (Bobby Axelrod and Chuck Rhoades are great characters, and the show does an amazing job of showing us how flawed they both are. Damian Lewis plays "Axe," a hedge fund billionaire who became rich after shorting a bunch of stocks on 9/11 and other dubiously legal methods. You kind of know he's a bad guy, but he also tries to be a good dad, takes care of his employees, etc. And Chuck, on the other hand, is a "I'm fighting the righteous fight" kind of person as the US Attorney who prosecutes financial crimes, but he resorts to unethical methods to achieve his ends. It's a really interesting show about smart, flawed people who will stop at nothing to succeed.

The fourth season of Jack Ryan was pretty good. The first (and probably only) season of The Idol was not good at all. It's only five episodes long and I literally could not muster the energy to make it to three episodes. It's about a pop music idol who falls under the influence of a dangerous guy who's basically a cult leader (played by musician The Weeknd). I realized after the fact that The Weeknd also created the show and executive produced it, and suddenly that made a lot more sense... because the show was basically about every character in the narrative falling all over themselves to flatter the character The Weeknd plays, even though the character himself is unlikeable and uninteresting. It felt like a vanity project where The Weeknd was like, "Okay, I want to do a show where I'm the coolest, most interesting, most compelling person you've ever met. So everyone just act like that around me." No thanks.


TOP PICK: Billions (Season 1)