I was traveling for the past week— I went down to the DC area to record some video lectures, about which more later— so blog content was pretty minimal, and we’ll skip the usual “Week in Review” thing. I did, however, get back in time to watch movies with the kids, so here’s the weekly report on that:
A Knight’s Tale:
On Friday night, SteelyKid declared an interest in going to the football game at the high school to run around with friends there, so I was watching with just The Pip. He asked to browse Netflix, and this was right at the start of the movies recommended by the algorithm, and he said “Sure, what the heck.”
This was a big hit, aside from a bit of performative grumbling about the romantic bits. It’s got an anachronistic soundtrack, as you can tell from the subtitles, and even The Pip could correctly call nearly all of the plot beats (“He’s going to lose to [the smarmy villain] in this joust, but will beat him at the end of the movie.”), but the cast is great and all the action is shot well. It was good fun.
Venom: Let There Be Carnage
SteelyKid loved the first Venom movie when we watched it on streaming a while back, so once this came out we were bound to end up back at the drive-in to see it. The Pip is a hard “Nope” on this, so it was just me and SteelyKid.
As you can maybe tell from the photo, we were farther back from the screen this time (it took forever to get through the line of cars waiting to get in). We also had a little trouble tuning the portable radio in to get the sound (I bought a cheap boom box so I wouldn’t need to run my car during the show to keep the battery from dying), but once we got it worked out, it was a pleasant enough night. The greater distance from the screen made the CGI alien nonsense even less intelligible than usual, but Tom Hardy and Woody Harrelson are really going for it, so that was fun. SteelyKid was bummed that the serial killers (Harrelson and Naomie Harris as Shriek) died in the end (“They were such a power couple!”), and cackled throughout at the alien antics.
SteelyKid was also very excited by the mid-credits scene, which apparently connects the Venom franchise to the main MCU. This is presumably part of the multiversal nonsense that’s sweeping through, and as such just makes me sigh heavily.
(Speaking of overwrought MCU nonsense, The Pip stayed home with Kate, where they reportedly watched Captain America: Civil War. I asked for his review, and he said “It was good.”)
Bonus Movie-Night-on-the-Road Content:
I’m not into the idea of going to hang out in bars just yet, so I was mostly staying in my hotel room (I did meet some folks for a couple of dinners), where the TV had Netflix built in. I dug our family password out of my email, and logged in to have better entertainment options, so you get two more movie reports.
Layer Cake:
This is a pre-Bond Daniel Craig playing a British drug dealer on the verge of retirement who gets asked to do one last job. Very cool, very stylish, you can definitely see why they tapped Craig to be Bond after this. Also features Colm Meaney playing a bit of a heavy, which I always find slightly disorienting after watching too much Star Trek when I was in college. Good movie.
The Witcher: Nightmare of the Wolf:
This was one of those “I’ve had a few beers, but would like a few more before I go to bed, and none of the sporting events on tonight interest me” picks. It’s a cartoon prequel to the Witcher show that had a Moment a couple of years ago, and is really pretty dumb and bloody. But, you know, it gave me something to do while I had those beers.
Bonus Bonus Short-Form Content:
I also fired up episodes of some shows that have had/ are having a moment, while killing time between the end of taping and dinner a couple of the nights I was there. I didn’t take title-card pictures of these:
— Bridgerton: I generally dislike Jane-Austen-era-Britain content, so was perfectly ready to pass on this when it dropped a while back, but I heard yet another podcast episode on the drive down where the hosts raved about Regé-Jean Page in this, and someone at the taping was going on about the show and its cast, so I figured I should give it a shot. And, yeah, I pass. If I’m going to watch a bunch of British people being awful to one another, there should at least be drugs and violence.
—Squid Game: It’s somewhat rare for me to happen to have time to catch one of these sensations as it’s happening, so when this came up near the top of the recommendations, I said “What the hell…” It’s got some of the wild tonal swings I associate with Stephen Chow movies (among others), but I’m intrigued about what’s going on. I ended up watching three episodes on my trip, and will probably watch some more tomorrow (I’m getting a Pfizer booster shot today, so planning to more or less write tomorrow off…)
And, yeah, that’s a bunch of stuff.
Here are the traditional buttons for you to click or not:
And if you have thoughts on any of this, the comments will be open.
As someone who is really into the whole multiversal bullshit, do you think Venom is worth watching?