I always intend to get these done on the weekends but here we are on Wednesday again.
2.19.22 - Rain Man (Movie) - A semi-impulsive rewatch that I had been wanting to get around to for a while. Why? I don't know, it's a great movie and it had been several years since I watched it last. Young Tom Cruise is great and Dustin Hoffman is even better in this brotherly road trip story. This is such a well-paced film. Nothing is wasted, every scene is either touching, comedic, or dynamic and the story moves along so efficiently you don't even realize how moved you are until you get to the end. I don't know where this movie stands on my All Time List but I would watch this every 5 years or so, easily.
2.25.22 - Uncharted (Movie) - I didn't have any plans to watch this but it was showing at the drive in theatre that Lindsay and I enjoy frequenting so - why not. You know, it wasn't as bad as I expected. Thankfully I knew just what to expect - it's a pretty generic feeling action/adventure movie, with two characters that by name come from a video game series although they bear absolutely no resemblance to those characters whatsoever. The best part of this movie is Nolan North's cameo. Although the absolutely bonkers final action sequence deserves some praise as well - I felt like that sequence hewed closer to the video game origins of this franchise than anything else we saw in the entire film.
2.25.22 - American Crime Story: Impeachment (TV) - A ten episode miniseries (third season in the ACS franchise) focusing on the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal of the mid-90s. This show really did a great job of fleshing out the narrative for me. From cursory reading, I knew a lot of the names and general ideas of the scandal, but now I have a lot of depth in my understanding. The human element is really leaned into very heavily and that makes for good dramatic entertainment. Can't pretend there is no bias (Lewinsky was a consulting co-producer on the show), but even with that understanding, this show really hammered home the point that in this whole multi-year situation, it's safe to say that There Were No Good Guys - everyone was just a terrible person to more or less extent, and that's depressing in a way, but like I said, it also makes for great dramatic TV. Really good casting as well, Sarah Paulson is unrecognizable as Linda Tripp, Clive Owens turns in a solid if at-times one note performance as Bill Clinton, it's great to see Edie Falco again (fresh off my binge of Sopranos!) in the under-utilized role of Hillary, and even the B and C tier character level casting was terrific (Coby Smulders as Ann Coulter and Billy Eichner as Matt Drudge were two particular highlights).
2.26.22 - The Postmortal - Drew Magary (Book) - Going backwards in Magary's bibliography after last year's The Hike and The Night the Lights Went Out. This book falls into that old category of "not unenjoyable, but kind of a mess". The concept is good - Science discovers the cure for aging and it becomes widely available. The narrative unspools through a series of journals/record-type entries by a main character who gets The Cure and then lives through the next 80 years of human history, and we see just how civilization handles this radical change through his eyes and experiences. The first half - the setup - was all pretty interesting, but as the narrative gets larger and larger it feels like Magary can't control where he's going - even what could be several threads of interesting main-character growth/introspection feel painfully shallow and weak as we reach the climax. Not one I'd widely recommend.
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