I finished watching The Man In The High Castle this week – I certainly enjoyed season two more than season one. It dealt with bigger storylines and I liked the new characters. It still suffered from pacing issues and I felt that all the episodes, apart from the great final episode, could have had ten minutes shaved off them without any great loss of atmosphere or storytelling. The final episode seemed to tie up so many loose ends that I wonder if there will be a third season. I do hope so.
I also finished watching Preacher with Siggy. The final episode has an explosive and literally bullshit ending (but in a good way) and it was as quirky as expected. I thoroughly recommend it, even if you have never read the graphic novels. Dominic Cooper and Ruth Negga were great in it and so much better than their performances in Warcraft.
Gaming wise it was Star Wars Battlefront whenever I got the chance. I’m a little disappointed that the Scarif maps aren’t bigger, but it’s certainly chaotic good fun. The rookies are gradually learning the ropes and I’m feeling the sting when one of them catches me unawares and blasts a cap in my ass. Funniest moment this week was getting killed by ‘speeder bike’ which was flying along on its own without a rider – perhaps having jumped off or been killed ahead of me on the map.
Also watched episode two of the new series of BBC’s Sherlock. The episode seemed to be tapping into the scandals that rocked the BBC for its storyline – about a serial killer ‘hiding in plain sight’.
I love the performances of all the cast members, but some of the complexities of the plot relying on Sherlock’s superior brain (no matter how they are explained) are pretty far-fetched. Very entertaining nonetheless.
This week I am going to provide a couple of Honest Trailers as they have an uncanny knack of being on my wavelength. I love watching them after I’ve seen the films they feature and sit there laughing and saying ‘yes, yes, yes!’.
I watched the enormous turkey that is Independence Day: Resurgence and thought it was hilariously bad, even worse than X-Men: Apocolypse. Here’s the Honest Trailer:
The only main thing this doesn’t cover is why the huge spaceship flies off at the end, despite the queen alien being dead. This is the queen alien that chases after a school bus during the finale of the film looking like a cross between the queen alien in Aliens and the T-Rex from Jurassic Park.
I spent some time afterwards catching up with some other Honest Trailers I have missed e.g. for Warcraft, X-Men: Apocolypse and the divisive Ghostbusters (which I didn’t think was all that bad, but then I’m no huge fan of the original – I guess the people who abhorred it felt the same as I did when I first saw Star Wars Episode VII).
While reading number9dream I got to the part where the main character is hiding away from the Yakuza and passing the time by reading some books – ‘I read a weird novel by Philip K Dick about a parallel universe where Japan and Germany won the Second World War…’ he says. I wasn’t totally weirded out by the coincidence given that David Mitchell appears to have exactly the same tastes and influences as me.
Watched 10 Cloverfield Lane – the second film in what is now the Cloverfield franchise. I spent a lot of time trying to figure out if it was directly related to the original film.
It was a claustrophobic monster movie of a different kind with good performances all round and a very satisfying character arc for the heroine played by Mary Elizabeth Winstead (Bruce’s daughter in the later Die Hard films). While not as sinister as Anthony Hopkins in Westworld, John Goodman also did a good turn as the human monster before the real deal was revealed.
It was Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt meets Misery with a dash of Battle: Los Angeles and Speilberg’s War of the Worlds in that the story is told from one characters point of view. It was very good, tense, well-paced, well-acted and I look forward to the third film – The God Particle towards the end of this year.
In terms of food and drink, we went out for meal at Kura Kura in Loughborough.
(Image credit – from unsplash.com – by Blair Connolly)
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