Due to the Thanksgiving break, this week was mostly weekend, but we didn’t get that many Movie Nights out of that, because my dad was here for a couple of nights so we played cards rather than watching tv, and then SteelyKid had to finish up a homework assignment. We did end up with three, though:
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid:
I floated the idea of this a while back, after The Sting went over reasonably well, and they had agreed to in in principle before spotting Owen Wilson in a thumbnail then making me watch Shanghai Knights. We were having some difficulty getting them to settle on anything, so I went back to that, and they agreed. Kate had never seen it before, so she watched, too.
Unfortunately, this has to go down as a failure— too slow for both of the kids, but also for Kate, who didn’t see the point of it. The kids liked the scenes I knew they would— the knife fight, the train robberies, the cliff jump— but even the chase sequence was at a more leisurely pace than they liked. I still really enjoyed it, though.
Knives Out:
Friday and Saturday, to head off endless dithering, I suggested a Movie Swap: each of the kids got to pick a movie they had watched but the other hadn’t (within reason), and we’d do that. SteelyKid won the coin toss to go first, and chose Knives Out, which we watched back in the summer.
This was my third time seeing this (Kate and I saw it in the theater in an early release), and it holds up really well. Everything about this is so well done— the script, the performances, the design. Both kids loved it, restoring a little of my faith that they can, in fact, like good things.
A Knight’s Tale:
This got off to a slightly rocky start; The Pip’s first choice for his half of the rewatch was Scott Pilgrim, which he’s been agitating for, but SteelyKid categorically refuses to watch it for reasons I don’t understand. The next one we came up with was this, which we first watched just a month or so ago (that’s actually the photo from the previous watch), when SteelyKid opted to go to a school football game instead. SteelyKid agreed to the idea on Friday, but then declared the early bits of this “Slow and boring,” and went to another room for a bit.
Kate was able to coax SteelyKid back by the time the jousting and the anachronistic music really got going, though, and by the end of it both kids were hooked. So it worked out in the end…
Ongoing Streaming Content:
I’ve watched one and a half of the three segments of the Beatles documentary that dropped this week; SteelyKid watched a bit with me, including the scene where Paul is fiddling with a guitar and just writes “Get Back.” Even SteelyKid recognized that, and said “Wait, did he just invent that song just like that?” I said “Yeah, but keep in mind, these guys are all geniuses.”
I’ll probably finish it this week while exercise biking, and will say more once the whole thing is done.
We also watched the new (fourth) episode of The Wheel of Time which is clearly setting itself up as its own thing, diverting from the books a lot more than the first three did. I liked it, on the whole; a few bits struck me as being A Bit Much, but I mostly understand why they did what they did.
Again, I’ll write up something longer once the season is complete.
And that’s this week in media consumption at Chateau Steelypips. We’ll most likely have a Movie Night hiatus for a week or two, now— I’m supposed to be out of town next Friday, and a friend is having a party next Saturday, and the following week The Pip has a travel baseball tryout on Friday evening. We’ll see what happens, though.
Here are the traditional buttons:
and if you want to berate my family for not liking Butch Cassidy, the comments will be open.