Not everything I watch becomes part of the Story Pile. Sometimes, I’ll watch something and ask myself if I have anything interesting to say, and determine the answer to that is nah. I start things, decide I’m bored, and stop. While everything is interesting, and you can always connect things that don’t interest you into complicated, interesting, intersecting things, that doesn’t mean it’s always worth the effort, certainly for someone like me.
I’m still bitter that people seemed to think Schitt’s Creek was worth all that fuss after all.
Here then is a list of different stuff I watched that I didn’t think was worth a proper Story Pile article for some reason or another.
Castlevania
I took a long break from the Netflix Castlevania. News had come out about the way Warren Ellis treated women in private and turns out that it made it hard to appreciate all the ways in which that writer’s voice came through in the dialogue. I really liked this series, and I do like the extra seasons we have now, but…
Yeah.
Warren Ellis sucks.
Wolf of Wall Street
I watched an hour of this movie and it’s really boring? Like you’re getting to watch rich assholes engage in random excess doing things that stockbrokers do. It isn’t shocking or interesting, I guess, and so, yeah, rich people are assholes. I found it genuinely difficult to care about what was happening in this movie, and it wasn’t like he was ever going to really get done for anything. Rich guys don’t suffer, and even if he was somehow caught for all the drugs and crimes and just being awful, he was already a stockbroker when he started.
Like, woo, movie industry makes movie about rich dudes committing unspeakable acts of harm and never being held to account. Shocker. I wonder if there’s something metatextual I could glean in all that, I dunno.
Airplane!
This movie’s really funny. I think in the time people have had to watch it since I was, you know, born, then that, you know, they noticed that. A bunch of the humour doesn’t work great any more, because it’s not 1980 any more. The way we get on board planes now is fundamentally completely different due to a terrorist attack that has made the entire landscape of what you can even make jokes about totally different. In conclusion, Airplane! is a land of contrasts.
Venom
I’m glad I don’t do predictions. This movie looked boring and irritating to me as it was being announced, and I figured it would be bad and I wouldn’t like it, and that would result in a bunch of discourse around a movie that really seemed tedious to me. And like, yeah, some of that wound up being true. I’m really confused as to why people are so thirsty for this movie except as just, you know, the generic monsterfuckeryness of it. This multinational movie that doesn’t do cute or funny or cool things with its idea nonetheless is just a blank enough slate that people have made the protagonist into a sort of mangy dog kissboy and now we’re going to get a bunch of these movies.
It was reasonably fun, just…
Man, it is not that good.
Catch me if You Can
I thought this movie would be a good Tricks Month movie, but it honestly isn’t that good for cons. It’s much more ‘hey, can you believe this worked back in the day?’ and didn’t really demonstrate a lot of mastery. It’s a story about how bad decentralised systems are at managing fraud, so like maybe nationalising banks would be good or something.
Bojack Horseman
It’s hard to imagine having anything particularly interesting to say about Bojack Horseman. The series is absolutely well crafted, it’s impressively hard work to watch through, and it is remarkable that Aaron Paul and Will Arnett are both part of two of the most important TV shows in the 21st century, and they’re not the same show.
It’s just it’s also a showbiz show, so it’s not like I can say, really, how authentic or realistic or true-feeling anything in it is? They make jokes about oh, THESE parts of LA think about THIS or THESE parts of Chicago have THESE opinions about it and like they could be making all that up. I don’t know how true that is. I’m not American, and people ‘oh it’s so true!’ with stuff that they can’t really speak to is something media makes feel easy.
‘Free Churro’ is a great meme to summarise a lot of complex feelings, as is ‘halfway down.’
Miscellaneous Good THings
I have now watched Identity, Uncut Gems and Argo. I’ve also seen The Quick And The Dead. They’re all fine, neat even, but I just don’t imagine I’d have anything interesting to say about them that isn’t already extremely covered. I guess Argo was less interesting than I thought, and also kinda underscored the truth that persists, the CIA is always doing weird shit. I watched Simon Amstell’s Set Free, which is funny, in that awkward way of Simon Amstell if you’re already familiar with his particular variety of gangly meat comedy. You will hear a gay man talk about forgiveness and culminates with a really good message, but it is also meant to lean on that space of wondering if someone is getting paid to share their therapy session.
And… that’s stuff from 2021 that I think I want to put out here, on the blog, to sort of exorcise it. I won’t try to whip up a thousand words about Argo, because hey, I already mentioned it here.
And that’s… it. Some unremarkables, some fines, some alrights.