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[mare]

Is Squid Game good? I'm looking for new (or "new") shows to binge watch this summer with my newfound free time. We started watching Resident Alien a couple of months ago, but nothing else new.

I lurk on your Kieran tweets when they pop up in my notifications, so you're my running award season commentary. Thanks for keeping me informed!  I think I caught one where you were saying we needed to rank celebrity death matches based on Hot Ones and you're absolutely right. I'm probably misremembering and exaggerating your calling it a death match, but I wholeheartedly support that interpretation .

I avoided Squid Games for years because in my head, I pictured it as gory as Saw and the whole non-English thing made me avoid it but I'm glad I decided to watch it. Like Steph and Julie have been saying, once you get past the dubbing, it's not so bad. They do a decent job with the dubbing actually. I am watching Resident Alien too! I LOVED the first season. Alan Tyduk is hilarious. I'm not that far into season 2, but so far it hasn't been as great as season one. As far as other recommendation s, not sure what streamers you have, but I enjoyed Only Murders in the Building on Hulu and Shrinking on AppleTV. Of course, it wouldn't be me if I didn't recommend Succession lol Evil on paramount + is excellent as is What We Do in the Shadows on Hulu. Interview with a Vampire is on Netflix and it's really great as well.

I'm glad I can be of service in your awards updates. Even though I am very much a one trick pony. The big news rolling around is that two of the big awards contenders, The Brutalist and Emilia Perez were just outed as using AI to help enhance the actor's accents. Which people like me are delighted about because the Brutalist fans are the ones making the most noise about Kieran and category fraud.

A little lesson:

Technically his performance in A Real Pain by definition does fall into the Supporting category as he isn't the storyteller, and we never get to see through his eyes ever. But he also is in enough of the movie and has a big enough part where he could have also run in lead. The problem with that is in Oscar rules, you can't have two lead performances competing in the same category from one movie, so it made sense for them to run Kieran in supporting and Jesse in lead because at the time they were hopeful Jesse would get some awards love. So Kieran is running away with all these accolades and it's pissing all these other people off. Meanwhile Adrien Brody has gotten award winning praise for his Hungarian accent in The Brutalist. 😉

I'm not sure where the Celebrity Death Match came from? I mentioned Best of the Worst. There was someone who tweeted how it's funny how Kieran is the more famous Culkin and all the Home Alone fans basically went beserk and one of the things they kept saying is Macauley is so famous he regularly appears on Best of the Worst. That's when I mentioned Hot Ones, because Kieran has been on that and I think out of those two shows, that's the one that's a tad bit more popular. Maybe someone else in that thread went on to mention celebrity death match? lol

I'll be glad when awards season is over because these movie people are intense! I thought some of the BSB fans were bad. Yikes!

[RokofAges75]

I highly recommend Squid Game, Dee!  I started watching it when it came out to see what the hype was about (and find out why people were concerned about our students playing Red Light Green Light at recess), and I absolutely loved it!  I re-watched the first season a couple months ago in preparation for the second season, and it was just as good the second time around.  It is pretty brutal in parts, but you'll get a feel for that in the first episode.  It does have a plot and character development and isn't just torture porn.  And you get used to the dubbing or subtitles, depending on which way you choose to watch it.  Just don't watch with your son in the room. 😄

[Carter-Orange]

And another I'll recommend if you like Squid Game is Alice In Borderland (Julie, you'll love it I'm sure).  It's a Japanese drama about a group of friends who suddenly find themselves in a strange version of Tokyo in which they must compete in dangerous games in order to survive.  It reminds me a little of The Hunger Games/Squid Game and it is violent, but so so good.  There's a series 3 coming soon which I can't wait for.  I think it's on Netflix.  It's probably dubbed into English but I watch in Japanese with subtitles as I like to hear the actors real voices.

[RokofAges75]

I'll have to give Alice in Borderland a try!  I've seen it pop up on Netflix but have never clicked on it.

I watched A Real Pain last night.  It was good!  It gave me all the feels - I laughed out loud in parts and cried in others (mostly the concentration camp stuff).  Kieran was fantastic!  He nailed the whole charismatic, manic-depressive vibe Benji had going on.  Jesse Eisenberg was also great and so relatable to me, as I'm used to being the quiet, introverted, anxious one with more extroverted friends and a sister with mental illness.  The pace was perfect, too - it was over before I started wondering, "How much longer is this movie?"  Kudos to your boy!

I didn't watch much TV this weekend.  I started the SNL documentary on Peacock, but that's about it.  I've been writing and trying to avoid social media.  I had to remove Facebook from my home screen so I wouldn't keep clicking on it and seeing people I know in real life posting pictures of their inauguration watch parties. 🤦‍♀️🤢🤮  Secretly voting for the Antichrist is bad enough, but proudly declaring their support for him and celebrating his victory is downright disgusting and has made me lose any last shred of respect I had for these people.  I decided that was enough social media for me today.

[nicksgal]

I'm glad I can be of service in your awards updates. Even though I am very much a one trick pony. The big news rolling around is that two of the big awards contenders, The Brutalist and Emilia Perez were just outed as using AI to help enhance the actor's accents. Which people like me are delighted about because the Brutalist fans are the ones making the most noise about Kieran and category fraud.

A little lesson:

Technically his performance in A Real Pain by definition does fall into the Supporting category as he isn't the storyteller, and we never get to see through his eyes ever. But he also is in enough of the movie and has a big enough part where he could have also run in lead. The problem with that is in Oscar rules, you can't have two lead performances competing in the same category from one movie, so it made sense for them to run Kieran in supporting and Jesse in lead because at the time they were hopeful Jesse would get some awards love. So Kieran is running away with all these accolades and it's pissing all these other people off. Meanwhile Adrien Brody has gotten award winning praise for his Hungarian accent in The Brutalist. 😉

I'm not sure where the Celebrity Death Match came from? I mentioned Best of the Worst. There was someone who tweeted how it's funny how Kieran is the more famous Culkin and all the Home Alone fans basically went beserk and one of the things they kept saying is Macauley is so famous he regularly appears on Best of the Worst. That's when I mentioned Hot Ones, because Kieran has been on that and I think out of those two shows, that's the one that's a tad bit more popular. Maybe someone else in that thread went on to mention celebrity death match? lol

I'll be glad when awards season is over because these movie people are intense! I thought some of the BSB fans were bad. Yikes!

The last movie I saw in theaters was Barbie, so I am woefully behind on everything!  I almost watched the Golden Globes because Nikki Glaser was hosting, but ultimately decided a couple of her jokes and a bunch of things I didn't see wasn't worth watching in whole.

Until reading this, I hadn't heard of Best of the Worst, so I figured it was some sort of celebrity competition because that sounded more fun, instead of just a run of the mill interview show, like it clearly actually is. I'm the one who wanted celebrity death matches!

I highly recommend Squid Game, Dee!  I started watching it when it came out to see what the hype was about (and find out why people were concerned about our students playing Red Light Green Light at recess), and I absolutely loved it!  I re-watched the first season a couple months ago in preparation for the second season, and it was just as good the second time around.  It is pretty brutal in parts, but you'll get a feel for that in the first episode.  It does have a plot and character development and isn't just torture porn.  And you get used to the dubbing or subtitles, depending on which way you choose to watch it.  Just don't watch with your son in the room. 😄

I avoided Squid Games for years because in my head, I pictured it as gory as Saw and the whole non-English thing made me avoid it but I'm glad I decided to watch it. Like Steph and Julie have been saying, once you get past the dubbing, it's not so bad. They do a decent job with the dubbing actually. I am watching Resident Alien too! I LOVED the first season. Alan Tyduk is hilarious. I'm not that far into season 2, but so far it hasn't been as great as season one. As far as other recommendation s, not sure what streamers you have, but I enjoyed Only Murders in the Building on Hulu and Shrinking on AppleTV. Of course, it wouldn't be me if I didn't recommend Succession lol Evil on paramount + is excellent as is What We Do in the Shadows on Hulu. Interview with a Vampire is on Netflix and it's really great as well.

Having watched plenty of anime in my day, subtitles don't bother me nearly as much as bad dubbing. I'd rather do some reading to avoid watching bad lip flaps. Is it super gory? That's a lot of why I've avoided it until now. And no, no, these are shows for mom to watch while he's at school this Summer. 

Alan Tudyk is hilarious! That's what really sold me after it was recommended to us. I've heard good things about both What We Do In The Shadows and Interview With a Vampire.

Today we've had a lot of Bluey on and now catching up on DVR After Midnight during naptime. We have fun here. lol

[RokofAges75]

It's bloody but not super gory beyond that.  There is shooting and stabbing but nothing like the Saw movies, which was Mare's concern.  The first episode will give you a good idea of what to expect, although I think it takes three episodes to really get into it.

[mare]

I'll have to give Alice in Borderland a try!  I've seen it pop up on Netflix but have never clicked on it.

I watched A Real Pain last night.  It was good!  It gave me all the feels - I laughed out loud in parts and cried in others (mostly the concentration camp stuff).  Kieran was fantastic!  He nailed the whole charismatic, manic-depressive vibe Benji had going on.  Jesse Eisenberg was also great and so relatable to me, as I'm used to being the quiet, introverted, anxious one with more extroverted friends and a sister with mental illness.  The pace was perfect, too - it was over before I started wondering, "How much longer is this movie?"  Kudos to your boy!

I didn't watch much TV this weekend.  I started the SNL documentary on Peacock, but that's about it.  I've been writing and trying to avoid social media.  I had to remove Facebook from my home screen so I wouldn't keep clicking on it and seeing people I know in real life posting pictures of their inauguration watch parties. 🤦‍♀️🤢🤮  Secretly voting for the Antichrist is bad enough, but proudly declaring their support for him and celebrating his victory is downright disgusting and has made me lose any last shred of respect I had for these people.  I decided that was enough social media for me today.

Yay! I'm so glad you enjoyed A Real Pain. I cried at the Holocaust tour part too. Because it was filmed in the real location and as a result only allowed the commentary as if it were a real tour, everything James says is what you would actually hear touring Majdanek. I'm sure it feels different in person, but that's the closest I'll probably ever get to touring a real concentration camp. Really powerful. That Gasp Kieran does after Jesse put's his hand on his shoulder at the very end before they leave was Kieran's honest reaction and not scripted. Jesse decided to keep it in there. I definitely related to David as well. All the anxiety and everything. I'm definitely the quietest at any kind of social gathering. I had a teacher friend very similar to Benji and it was a nightmare going out to eat with her because she overshared with everyone including the waitresses, the next table, everyone. Both my mentally ill parents used to do the same thing.

I agree it was the perfect length. I feel like any longer, it would have been overkill.

It's funny because I happen to be reading a book now "We Were the Lucky Ones." That takes place during the invasion of Poland by the Russians and Germans, so it's been interesting reading a story about a lot of the things that we learn about in that movie. It's a fantastic book that was turned into a series on Hulu. I'm going to start it as soon as I'm done with the book, which will probably be today.

I was thinking of watching that SNL documentary. Is it any good? Now that I'm staying away from the news as much as possible, I am watching more movies and documentaries. I watched a stand-up special last night on Netflix. Michael McIntyre. He's British and he's hilarious. I really am trying to avoid FB as much as possible. I've already snoozed some people and stopped following any kind of news. I'm going with the whole ignorance is bliss approach to things. I'm really bad at that. We'll see how it goes. I've already posted about Trump and all the actions he took on day one. It's going to be a very long four years my friends. 

The writer in me keeps imagining a world where Trump was President during the late thirties as WW2 was happening. How different America would look because he would have allied with Hitler right away. Because of that, Pearl Harbor probably wouldn't have happened, but just like Hitler teamed up with Russia only to betray them and invade himself, he would've done the same to the USA. Which would have made us occupied by the Germans. How different would that look? There might be a novel in there somewhere. We might be living it right now!

[mare]

Dee, like Julie said it's very bloody. If that makes you squeamish, you might have a hard time with it. I don't think I'm spoiling anything by saying that about 80 percent of the violence is gun related. People tend to be stabby too. I have a very low tolerance for gore, and it didn't bother me much. I did tend to look down at my phone when all the gunfire happened though. lol

Interview with a Vampire also bloody. Obviously. And What We Do in the Shadows can get gross sometimes. But in a hilarious way!

[RokofAges75]

I thought the concentration camp scenes were very well done.  The total silence aside from James's commentary as they walked to each part of the camp and the actors' reactions made it emotional.  I doubt they had to act very much.  I can only imagine what it's like to set foot there yourself.  I've never been to one either, and I'm not sure I would want to go, although I probably still would if I ever found myself in Poland or Germany because I do appreciate history.  I have been to the Holocaust Museum in Washington DC, which was good but so incredibly sad.  Just like in the camp they showed in the movie, that museum had a room you walk through that is just full of shoes.  That is the part I remember most; it made me cry then, and it made me cry watching the movie the other night, and I'm crying just thinking about it as I type this now.  Absolutely devastating to think that each pair of shoes belonged to a person who was murdered in one of these places.  I will never understand how anyone could hate a group of fellow human beings so much as to do something so unspeakably evil.  And the parallels between that period in history and our current one makes it all the more real and frightening.

I remember seeing the previews for We Were the Lucky Ones, but I never watched it.  You'll have to let me know if it's good.  I have to be in the right mood for anything Holocaust-related because it's so heavy.

The SNL documentary is good!  I think there are four episodes, and I've watched the first two.  The first one is about the audition process, and the second one is about the writing staff and what they do in a week.  They were both pretty interesting.

That is a scary thought but an interesting premise for a story.  Things would have turned out much differently if Trump were our president then.  If the US had sided with Germany during WWII, the Axis powers probably would have won, and our world might look a lot different nowadays.  I just pray our current administration is only a temporary evil and that we can take back control of this country in the next 2-4 years.

On a less depressing note, I got an extra day off work today because of the extreme cold (-23 wind chill when I checked this morning) and spent most of it writing.  My chapter is going well, and now I only have to work three days this week. Win win!