Another week, another couple of Movie Nights, plus a bonus streaming show.
Journey to the West: Conquering the Demons:
This is Stephen Chow’s adaptation of the first bit of the Chinese literary classic, which I described to The Pip as “The guy who did Kung Fu Hustle doing a Chinese myth” when it appeared as we were scrolling through Amazon Prime recommendations. He said “Sure,” so we gave it a shot.
I thought we were going to be in trouble when this turned out to be only in Chinese with subtitles (we’ve previously mostly watched things dubbed), but the Little Dude apparently watches a lot of anime that way, so he was fine with it. I had a little trouble, because the subtitles were weirdly small and faint— they sometimes blended into the bottom part of the images in a way that made them hard to read.
This is very, very strange, not helped by the fact that I was completely wiped out after a long week. The Pip liked it, though.
Throw Momma From the Train:
I had pitched this to the kids a while back, in part because one of SteelyKid’s classmates shares a name with Danny DeVito’s character, but it turned out not to be available on streaming at that time. It’s turned up on Prime now, though, and The Pip specifically asked for it, so we went with it. Kate joined us for this one (as you can see in the photo), but SteelyKid declined in favor of playing Minecraft on a group server with friends.
Like most 80s comedies, this has a bit more sexual humor than I remembered, but not quite enough to put The Pip completely off it. It’s also a little less zany than I remembered, but it does go full slapstick at key moments, which went over well. Some of the stuff Billy Crystal says about Captain Janeway hasn’t aged especially well, but it basically works.
Bonus Streaming Media Content: Murderville:
This is a new comedy show from Netflix, though like anything remotely funny that’s been made in the last few decades, it’s an American copy of a British show. Will Arnett stars as a homicide detective who gets saddled with a new partner each episode; the gag is that the new partner is a celebrity guest who doesn’t know anything about the plot, and thus has to improvise their lines. It ends with the guest star having to declare who they think the murderer was, and being told whether they were right by Haneefah Wood’s police chief character.
I watched the first three episodes (with Conan O’Brien, Marshwn Lynch, and Kumail Nanjiani) Thursday night, when I was unwinding after a long day of transatlantic book-promo activity (I recorded an interview for Irish radio in the morning, and did a livestreamed public lecture for the Royal Institution in the afternoon). Like all things improv-based, it’s a little uneven, but worked pretty well as undemanding but not idiotic entertainment while tired and short on brains. I might very well watch more of this the next time I’m recovering from a long day of streaming content.
That’s the Chateau Steelypips media report for the week. Here are the usual buttons:
And if you know anything about the sequel to Journey to the West (or sequels? I know there’s at least one…), the comments will be open.