This Week in Movie Nights

Red Notice, Shanghai Knights, and the Wheel of Time premiere

The big streaming-media news of the week was, of course the Wheel of Time show debuting on Amazon Prime, but Kate had work to finish on Friday night so we didn’t end up watching it in the usual Movie Night slot, and got in two movies with the kids as well:

Red Notice:

This is a Netflix original starring Gal Gadot as an international art thief, Dwayne Johnson as The Rock, and Ryan Reynolds as Ryan Reynolds. It’s apparently doing well for Netflix, though all the professional reviews I’ve read panned it as dumb and derivative.

But, you know, sometimes dumb and derivative is just the thing, and this was dopey fun. The kids cackled all the way through, particularly SteelyKid, who really enjoys Reynolds’s shtick.

Shanghai Knights:

When I asked for Movie Night suggestions, the specific request I got was for action comedy; after last week’s success with The Sting I pitched Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, mostly because I wanted to watch it. Before I could get to the search screen on Amazon, though, SteelyKid spotted the thumbnail for this in the recommendations (The Pip and I watched Shanghai Noon a while back) and said “Wait, is that Owen Wilson?”

A couple hours before it was time for movie-watching, I did something that caused all the muscles in the lower third of my back to completely lock up, which hurt like a sonofabitch (and still hasn’t really abated), so I’m not sure I can fairly evaluate this movie. I’m moderately certain it wasn’t good, though. But, again, the real audience here was the kids, who enjoyed it plenty; I think this is actually the first Jackie Chan movie that SteelyKid has watched, so I’ll try to pitch some of his movies that are actually good for a future Movie Night.

Bonus Streaming Content:

The show that launched a re-read of multiple thousands of pages has finally arrived… Kate had work to finish Friday night, but suggested we watch this Saturday morning, and that tends to be dead time anyway, so I agreed. I thought we’d probably just watch the first episode, but we ended up watching all three of the ones that were released to kick things off. As you can probably guess from that, we liked it fine.

The only well-known actor in the cast is Rosamund Pike, playing Moiraine; all the young protagonists are played by relative unknowns, which is as it should be. Pike gets saddled with the most ponderous and portentous dialogue, but she really sells it. Daniel Henney does a nice job as Lan, too, and their relationship feels real.

The younger actors mostly just need to be various levels of emo, which they do quite credibly, in ways that are mostly true to the characters they’re playing. These are somewhat different than the characters in the books— everybody gets a tragic backstory here where in the books they all started out happy— but most of the changes make sense given the shift in medium and the need to compress the story somewhat. They’ve also “aged up” all the characters a bit— technically, only Egwene was actually made older, but all four of the Two Rivers kids play as less innocent than they were in the books, which is probably for the best. It’s also clearly post-Game-of-Thrones-the-show, because they use actual curse words rather than the stand-ins Jordan favored.

The effects are generally good; the visible swirly lines for channeling are probably about the best you could do at capturing the magic system on screen, and Ba’alzamon’s face and eyes made for good jump scares. The Trollocs and Fades look appropriately monstrous, and the fight scenes were reasonably well done.

There are a handful of mis-steps— I really could’ve done without Perrin’s wife and the resulting angst (also, Perrin’s character is walking along the line of the “Big Equals Dumb” stereotype that’s one of my hot buttons), and there are places where they’re pretty clearly conserving resources by limiting the size of their sets and the number of extras required. There’s also the usual “shot in a variety of cool landscapes somewhere in Central Europe” issue where all the scenery is very cool, but it’s not at all clear how it fits together. I’ve read the books a bunch of times, but can’t really figure where the picturesque woods Lan and Moiraine are in sit in relation to the rugged mountains Rand and Mat hike over, let alone the windswept grasslands where Perrin and Egwene find themselves.

On the whole, though, I liked it, and so did Kate and SteelyKid. That last is probably the best sign for Amazon’s purposes, in that it means the show has a chance to play well with a general audience. SteelyKid isn’t a big genre reader or watcher, so should be a good test of whether the worldbuilding is getting across to people who haven’t read the books. (We did have to field a few questions, but not nearly as many as I feared when SK started watching with us…)

And now we’ll need to figure out a way to work this into our regular schedule of streaming media, at least for the next month or so…

Bonus Bonus Unlikely to Recur Streaming Content:

Kind of a crappy week, weather-wise, so I spent a bunch of time on the exercise bike during which I checked out a few things that have gotten varying levels of buzz. Of these, I liked the first episode of Reservation Dogs the best, and will probably watch more of that, but there were a couple of shows I gave a shot that I probably won’t come back to:

What We Do in the Shadows: This is a mockumentary-format show about ancient vampires now living in Staten Island, spun off from a movie by Jemaine Clement and Taika Waititi. It seems like the sort of thing I ought to like, and I can see some good elements. This is not the Christopher Guest sort of “affectionate portrayal of funny oddballs” mockumentary, though, it’s more in the “cringe comedy about people who all kind of suck” vein of The Office and as such didn’t really work for me.

The Sex Lives of College Girls: This is a new HBO show from Mindy Kaling that got a bunch of press when it dropped this week (though I hadn’t heard of it before that), and as a zeitgeist-y show about campus life, I felt the same vague sense of obligation to check it out as I did with The Chair a while back. While it’s well acted and written, though, it feels like they’re working off a big checklist of Important Issues that need to be set up and addressed, which is a thing that almost always puts me off a show.

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Anyway, that’s this week in media consumption at Chateau Steelypips. Here are some buttons:

and if you’d like to take issue with my Wheel of Time takes (or anything else), the comments will be open.