If you can’t tell by now, Gail and I are PBS junkies. It started a few years ago when we nuked cable for about a year and really got wired-in to this free service. I don’t know where we’d be without WTTW, probably divorced, destitute, and demented. Maybe I’m blowing things out of proportion.
This is a very catchy little bit of serialized TV. Gail and I liked season one enough to record season two on PBS recently. It picks up a few years after season one it seems and starts out with the same characters. After the second episode the main character leaves, but it clips on with the new person just fine.
We watched the Jobs biopic the other night. Gail’s mom was in town and had read the book, I was mildly interested, so what the heck. It follows Jobs’ life from his college years through his return to Apple after they bought Next Computer company (say 1997 maybe). Ashton Kutcher plays Jobs. It was okay.
This was a sweet movie, but not the overly done kind of sweet that leaves a sticky film in your mouth that you want to cleanse with beer or coffee. It was a good sweet. It was also pretty hilarious. It’s about a Seattle writer for an indie magazine who piles into his Escalade with two interns for a trip to a resort town where he’s charged with seeing if there’s an angle to a classified advertisement recruiting for someone to participate in time travel.
I had two thoughts as I walked out of this film. One, there seems to be a trend towards female heroes in teen lit, so does that mean there mostly female teen readers? Two, does it seem like the writers of these teen movies like to use the threat of suicide to get their characters out of last minute tricky situations? Actually, there was a third thought: I liked this better than Hunger Games.
Who doesn’t like hit man with a heart movies? What kind of cold heart do you have to have not to? I’ve seen two (3 Days to Kill) in the last few weeks because the genre works for me. Gail and I put this on one night because we are Cusack fans. He did hit man with a heart in one of my favorite movies of all time, Grosse Pointe Blank. Although this one was certainly not as good, or as funny, or as well soundtracked, it was pretty decent. Good intrigue and they didn’t dumb it down by making the CIA boss the mastermind. Enough said.
Gail and I are done with all three (so-called) seasons of Sherlock. Each season is not really a season in the American network TV sense; each one is actually a trilogy, made up of three 88 minute episodes. They never deviated from this formula in the slightest. It was effectively like watching nine full-length movies over the last few months. We even made some microwaveable Boy Scout kettle corn once to simulate the movie-going experience (thanks nephew Paul). Awesome.
This thing got considerably better in season two. I liked season one, but didn’t really get all of the hype. These next three episodes were worthy of some serious hype though. They had more interesting characters, better plots, and some huge climax scenes.
I was pleasantly surprised with this stylish thriller. Not great, but good. It was directed by this dude called McG and written by Luc Besson (he did The Professional), so it had a lot going for it even before you toss in the star power of Kevin Costner and Hailee Steinfeld (from True Grit).
This is a PBS documentary about the 2012 harvest in Napa Valley. I like food shows. I like food events. I like making food stuff part of my vacation experience. I’m even starting to cook, if you count smoothies and soft-boiled eggs as cooking. My relationship with food, I think, is a healthy one. I think.