Sunday, March 30, 2025
9:00 AM |
Recapping a Life
Lately—for the past few years, to be honest—I have sensed a pattern to my TV watching, and it always goes like this: the first season of a show invariably gets me hooked. Maybe it’s the premise that I find intriguing—a man gets into a game of life and death to win a bonanza; a young man finds he has superpowers, and finds himself fighting his father to save the world; a bunch of rich white folk check into an exotic resort not knowing that death for one of them is part of the immersion. Maybe it’s the crispness of the storytelling [hello, Severance or Game of Thrones or Dark], or the world-building is so intricate [hello, The Lord of the Things: The Rings of Power or The Wheel of Time or Dune: Prophecy], or the intrigue of the format is so addicting [hello, RuPaul’s Drag Race or The Traitors US or Survivor] that there’s no way I cannot make myself watch. Maybe it’s the way the characters feel fresh, as though their existence has been meticulously sketched just for me [hello, Dash and Lily]. I can be enthralled by what I find on Netflix, on Disney+, on HBO Max. And I am also a completist, so I consume every episode with the kind of manic energy that can only come from needing—aching—to know what happens next. I can be obsessed with a TV show.
And then the second season rolls around.
Somewhere in the tangle of new characters, shifting allegiances, and increasingly convoluted plot lines, my ADHD-riddled brain begins to short-circuit. Who is this new character again? Why are they suddenly in Westeros? Was this the guy from three episodes ago or someone entirely new? I watch, but I also… don’t. I invariably forget things. I rewind scenes but still miss crucial details. The sharpness of my understanding blurs into the background noise of a world expanding too fast for my neurons to keep up.
So what do I do?
I read recaps. Religiously. I scroll through Vulture like it’s my salvation. I let YouTube videos made by pop culture aficionados to spoon-feed me the details I failed to retain [hello, New Rockstars!]. “Oh, so that’s why Kendall Roy did that,” I mutter to myself. “Oh, so the goats in Yellowjackets are a metaphor.” I have made my peace with this process. It’s a life.
Maybe it’s not just about TV shows. Maybe it’s about how my brain functions in general. The way I navigate the world, consuming fragments of knowledge in non-linear ways, always needing a narrative scaffolding to piece it all together. It’s like being an architect of my own understanding, building with borrowed bricks. But maybe this tendency to need a secondhand interpretation of things I love isn’t about laziness or even incompetence. Maybe it’s something deeper.
Maybe my adult ADHD is a rebellion against a world that refuses to accommodate minds that think in spirals rather than straight lines? Maybe all this neurodivergence is not a curse but a call—to live a creative life, an expressive one. To reject the dull machinations of an artless existence. To understand the world not through memorized facts and formulas, but through emotion, intuition, and an ability to see beauty where others see only the mundane. The inability to sit still or to execute a task so readily, to follow a linear narrative, to adhere to prescribed norms—I don’t think this is a failing. I think it is a refusal to conform to systems that were never designed for people like us in the first place.
My ADHD says: stop stuffing me with useless information. It says: let me live; let me carve out a life that is rich in meaning, in joy, in discovery; let me exist in a way that is fully, beautifully my own.
And maybe that is why I have always clung to art—to film, to books, to music, to TV shows, even with my kind of attention span—because I also like stories that sprawl beyond the confines of syllabi, that resist easy categorization. And yes, maybe I need a roadmap sometimes—a recap, a review, a trusted voice to remind me where we are in the plot—but does that make the journey any less valuable? Or does it simply make it my own?
Perhaps this is why I find comfort in my kind of creative chaos. I do not need to follow a narrative from point A to point B to understand its value. I do not need a perfectly structured essay to tell me that meaning is there, waiting to be unearthed. I am at home in the whirlwind of half-formed thoughts, unfinished projects, and sudden bursts of inspiration that sometimes fade as quickly as they arrive. And that is okay.
Maybe ADHD isn’t a disorder at all. Maybe it’s just an unwillingness to care for the crumbling order of an information age given to fake news and AI-regurgitated narratives. Maybe it’s a refusal to be herded like cattle, an insistence on taking responsibility for the shape of our own lives. Maybe it’s a radical rejection of limitation, of senseless rules. Maybe it is the quiet revolution of those who refuse to be boxed in. Maybe it’s an embrace of something better, something bigger. Maybe it is a way of being that is fluid, dynamic, deeply personal. Maybe it is a different kind of intelligence that does not bow to the rigidity of the world but instead reshapes the world to fit its own rhythms.
Maybe?
Maybe.
Labels: adhd, life, memory, mental health, pop culture, television
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Saturday, March 22, 2025
This always happens to me with subsequent seasons of a TV show I like after the first one gets me hooked [e.g., Game of Thrones, Severance, etc.]. As I watch the rest of the next seasons, my ADHD brain can no longer quite follow the twists and turns, and the myriad new characters. So what do I do? I read recaps of each episode [usually in Vulture] to have them explain to me what exactly is going on. I’ve made my peace with this. It’s a life.Labels: adhd, culture, life, mental health, television
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Sunday, February 25, 2024
11:05 AM |
The Fascination of The Floor
I’m enjoying Rob Lowe’s new game show
The Floor but its fundamental flaw is that it will always favor, as the overall winner, a player who will be called in later episodes. He/she succeeds on the labors of previous winners, and just swoop in winning great swathes of territory often after winning only one duel, relegating exhausted previous winners to the exit. But here’s what’s fascinating: the show also obliquely offers insight on how capitalism works. Yes, life under capitalism. It perfectly demonstrates the grit of the rat race: how one tries so hard, often on skills not demonstrably your own, to win life’s little duels — but the biggest “landowners” can rest easy and win the big cash at the end of each episode. The ease of passive income.
Labels: capitalism, game shows, television
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Monday, December 25, 2023
4:43 PM |
Carol and the End of the World
So what's my Christmas Day watch? Carol and the End of the World. Nothing like an apocalyptic animated series to make me feel oh so Christmassy. Not many people know this about me but my favorite genre of movies is the apocalyptic film — because generally I just love to see the world burn or plunge to existential chaos with its imminent ending, cinematically. They’re generally of the dramatic sort, a nightmare of dystopic proportions. But Carol and the End of the World upends all of that, because it is actually quite utopic in its take of the world ending. Sure, a rogue planet called Keppler 9C is hurtling towards Earth in the course of seven months, and almost everyone is suddenly in hedonistic mode while awaiting the end of the world. And sure, it follows a sad, closed-up, seemingly purposeless woman who feels unanchored in that new world and just yearns to find a life where the old routines are respected and followed. [She finally finds it in The Distraction, a floor in an office building somewhere in an abandoned business district, which has gradually attracted people like Carol to do the old routines of going to work.] But what this Netflix series ultimately becomes is a chronicle of purpose, of community, even in the face of impeding doom — and getting there is such a journey of existentialist joy, if that makes sense. Above all, nothing of it is cloying or saccharine, which is reflective of the strengths of this series’ writers and creators. I'm glad this was my Christmas Day watch. I expected despair, I encountered hope instead.Labels: life, television
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Monday, December 18, 2023
1:12 AM |
FellowTravelers
“I’ve spent most of my life waiting for God to love me. And then I realized the only thing that matters is I love God. It’s the same with you. I have loved you my whole life. I’ve never loved anyone but you. You were my great, consuming love. And most people don't get one of those. I did. I have no regrets.”
Labels: life, love, queer, television
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Saturday, November 05, 2022
1:42 PM |
Halfway Through Documentary Now! Season 4
Finally, an episode of Documentary Now! S4 that I’m really digging! I have loved the mockumentary series since it began in 2015, but I didn’t really the dig the first two instalments of this season, despite loving the original documentaries they were based on.
“Soldier of Illusion, Parts 1 and 2” [a riff on Les Blank’s Burden of Dreams, and Werner Herzog’s Grizzly Man, Into the Abyss, and My Best Fiend] is ingenious enough in its juxtaposing a crazy story involving a German director shooting a documentary on the indigenous people of the Ural Mountains while simultaneously filming a sitcom pilot—but the original conceit, involving the mad logistics of Herzog filming the actual moving of an entire ship over steep, dangerous land from one river system to another in the Amazon for Fitzcarraldo proves even crazier. The ridiculousness of the riff basically pales in comparison. “Two Hairdressers in Bagglyport” [a riff on Philippa Lowthorpe’s Three Salons at the Seaside with bits of R. J. Cutler’s The September Issue thrown in] is more successful, and also more faithful to the original British documentary—but infusing it with Anna Wintour-style hijinks felt forced. The September Issue deserves a fuller riff than just being a source of a plot point. Doing it like this deprives us of a much-needed Documentary Now! take on Grace Coddington, which is a shame.
But I love “How They Throw Rocks,” a riff on Leon Gast’s When We Were Kings, the documentary on the legendary boxing match between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman in Zaire. I love how they transposed boxing into an allegedly Welsh “sport” of brutal rock-throwing. They got the riffs just right, from Ali's bigger-than-life persona, to Ali’s “rope-a-dope” technique that brought down a stronger foe [riffed into this episode’s “turtling”].
I hope the rest of the season will be as irreverent, callback-y, and funny as this episode.Labels: comedy, documentaries, television
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Tuesday, October 11, 2022
7:09 PM |
Louis and Lestat
Okay, fine. The TV adaptation of Anne Rice’s Interview With the Vampire, airing on AMC, totally goes there, so I’m here for it. But I was initially put off by the casting of Eric Bogosian as the interviewer, and he begins the TV show, and for some reason I cannot stand the man. So it took me a while to continue. All I needed was patience [and a few more scenes]. Also Jacob Anderson is hot. Never thought of Louis as any other race but white [Brad Pitt!] — but this race-blind casting totally fits.
Labels: boys, queer, television, vampires
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Thursday, January 28, 2021
7:21 PM |
Cloris Leachman, 1926-2021
I was a late worshipper at the altar of Cloris Leachman [1926-2021], encountering her first, or so I thought, as the embittered, greedy, but funny Ida in
Malcolm in the Middle, in my younger years of earnest television-watching. That image of a devil-may-care old lady was what got scorched into my brain. And those glorious cheekbones. Turns out, I've seen—and loved—her before in Peter Bogdanovich's enduring classic
The Last Picture Show (1971), where she played Ruth Popper, a repressed housewife who has an affair with a high school senior, and for which she won an Oscar for best supporting actress. That recognition for high drama belied a comic genius, including stints in two Mel Brooks comedies,
Young Frankenstein (1974) and
High Anxiety (1977), and in the TV comedy classic
The Mary Tyler Moore Show, where she often stole the show as the erratic landlady to Mary and Rhoda. I loved her every time she appeared on the screen, be it TV or film. She also appeared in Quentin Tarantino'
s Inglourious Basterds [2009] as Mrs. Himmelstein, something I looked forward to seeing when her casting was announced [Cloris in a Tarantino flick!], but her scenes were cut from the theatrical release of the film. She will be missed.
Labels: film, obituary, people, television
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Tuesday, January 26, 2021
6:00 PM |
I Heart Steven Yeun
I'm such a huge Steven Yeun fan. When I started to sour on the repetitive banality of
The Walking Dead and I was starting to hate-watch it and fast-forwarding most episodes, I told myself I'll stop watching when Glenn dies. I stopped watching one episode before he did.
More Steven Yeun
here.
Labels: film, people, pop culture, television, things that caught my eye
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Thursday, December 24, 2020
12:00 PM |
Ranking the Queer Holiday Romance Movies of 2020
If there was one thing that's most curious about popular entertainment in our unprecedented pandemic year, it is the plethora of gay holiday movies that has suddenly come out, most particularly from platforms that have for so long embraced heteronormativity as a given. I'm talking primarily about Lifetime and Hallmark Channel, both of which grind out these holiday romances every year, unapologetic for their formula and for their sheer quantity—and more so for hewing close to an idea of love as strictly being heterosexual. Gay men and women hardly appear in these confections, and if they do, they play support: the best friend, the quirky boss, perhaps the florist.
But something happened late last year that would alter the landscape of Christmas romance movies this year. Patrick Serrano, writing for
The Oprah Magazine,
identifies the turning point: "Then came 2019, when the LGBTQ+ representation in the TV movie sphere shifted completely, thanks to two forces. First, Lifetime’s
Twinkle All the Way featured a quick gay kiss between two C-plot characters played by Brian Sills and the ever-so-handsome, Mark Ghanimé. Around the same time as this landmark, if unceremoniously unrolled, depiction of gay affection, the Hallmark Channel pulled a Zola ad featuring a same-sex wedding and kiss because it was deemed 'controversial.'"
The pulling of that Zola ad, which was the Hallmark Channel's response to ultra-conservative forces decrying the "desecration" of one remaining stronghold of heteronormativity in the name of "family values," gave rise to LGBTQ voices protesting the decision—which, in turn, put under the spotlight, the very notion of representation in these movies.
Why indeed have these movies resisted for so long gay love? After the public outcry, the network eventually reinstated the commercials.
The clapback must have been swift and brutal because only a year later, we have notably these: Hulu with
Happiest Season, Paramount Network with
Dashing in December, Lifetime with
The Christmas Setup, and Hallmark itself with
The Christmas House.
I had no plans to watch any of these. I've seen two or three of these Christmas romance movies before, and they've always struck me as pantomimes of holiday cheer and romantic love, the snow obviously fake, the screenplay an odious amalgam of retold stories [usually involving disputed real estate in some winsome rural setting, where the city rat learns to relax and give in to love, but not before a confrontation about lies and the secrets people keep], the cinematography a flatness of landscape that has no idea of depth or texture, and the characters overwhelmingly white in skin color and privilege. [In other words, I hate Christmas romance movies.]
But the curiosity eventually kicked in:
what is a gay Christmas romance movie? I wanted to see how this panned out—and now that I have, here is my ranking of all four films [plus a series], from embarrassing inanity to giddy holiday joy...
5.
The Christmas House (Michael Grossman,
The Hallmark Channel)
Hallmark, the most conservative platform of the lot, steps ever so gingerly into diversity—by giving us a love story between a man and a woman, except that the man has a gay brother who is happily married to another man. Well, it's a start. Small steps, you could say. But it's not helped by the blandest of execution—a movie that sleepwalks its way through slapdash Christmas romance movie conflict and resolution. Brothers Mike (Robert Buckley), a TV actor, and Brandon (Jonathan Bennett), a baker, come home to revive an old family tradition—helping their parents Phylis (Sharon Lawrence) and Bill (Treat Williams) decorate full blast their house in Christmas lights and ornaments one last time, with the effusive help of Brandon's husband Jake (Brad Harder), before putting the house on the market. [Real estate!] Then Mike reconnects with high school friend and former neighbor Andi (Ana Ayora)—and a change of heart is in order, making theirs the central romance of the film, thrusting the gay couple into the sidelines, a diversity figurehead for the most part. It wouldn't have been so bad were it not for the fact they're in a film so bland nothing in it is believable.
4.
Happiest Season (Clea Duvall,
Hulu)
From first hearing about it, I was happy enough to dive into this lesbian Christmas romance movie, which felt very much like a corrective. But everything in Clea Duvall's film rubbed me the wrong way, from characters who are all extremely unlikable you could not find anyone to properly root for, to underlying thematic implications—gaslighting and emotional abuse in relationships, among other things—that gnaw at you, and continues at it post-screening that I had to ask myself if the film really made those choices, and what for. The story is simple and unproblematic enough: Harper (Mackenzie Davis) is taking her girlfriend Abby (Kristen Stewart) home for the holidays for the first time—but soon admits she has yet to come out to the family, thus necessitating a ruse that leads to shenanigans of all sorts. Duvall stages these "shenanigans" in strange comic sequences—a misunderstanding at the mall, for example, leads to cameos by comedians Timothy Simons and Lauren Lapkus as mall security too eager to delve deep into an accusation of shoplifting—which I take as Duvall making light of her material, but they stick out so much as sore thumbs they feel like standup comedy that has totally bombed it leaves the audience with plastered fake smiles as they try to make sense of a terrible punch line that doesn't land. This film is a joke that never lands.
3.
Dashing in December (Jake Helgren,
Paramount Network)
From Paramount Network comes a film that hews the closest to a typical Christmas romance movie: finance whiz Wyatt (Peter Porte) finally comes home, after five long years, to the family ranch in Colorado, ran by his widowed mother Deb (Andie MacDowell). But he has other things beside reunion in mind: he wants to convince his mother to sell the ranch [real estate!], which has long been a money pit he's been unwillingly bankrolling for years. Somewhat tense holiday dinners ensue—and it is up to ranch hand Heath (Juan Pablo Di Pace) to convince Wyatt to give the farm another go. Wyatt remains resolute, until he finds himself falling for Heath's rugged charm. It's all cute and comfortable, driven mostly by the believability of the characters and a focused sense of place.
2.
Dash and Lily (Joe Tracz,
Netflix)
Netflix's
Dash and Lily is not a movie but a web series, but it feels like a worthy addition to this list because of one thing: the joyful pairing of Langston (Troy Iwata) and Benny (Diego Guevara) as a newly-hitched gay couple who do not just provide bland support to the titular leads, but actually provide the conceit [clues and dares in a red notebook!] that drive the story, and gets their own arc as well. The main love story, based on the YA novel by David Levithan and Rachel Cohn, is winsome enough to follow: Christmas grinch Dash (Austin Abrams) and Christmas lover Lily (Midori Francis) find themselves falling in love, sight unseen, over the course of the holiday season as they exchange heartfelt correspondence [and dares] in a notebook, making full use of New York as a veritable Christmas wonderland. And then there's Langston and Benny who are unapologetic for their sheer horniness, they feel totally deserving of a spin-off.
1.
The Christmas Setup (Pat Mills,
Lifetime)
Lifetime's effort, like
Dashing in December, also feels very close to the tropes we demand of a Christmas romance movie, including real estate as the B-plot, but I am utterly gobsmacked by how it transcends the formula without losing a single iota of its charm. This film is utterly delightful, and earns every ounce of sweetness it concocts—and while it is derivative and predictable [it is, after all, a Christmas romance movie], its characters feel grounded enough by winning performances they actually do the same to the material. Hugo (Ben Lewis) is a somewhat uptight, if ambitious, New York attorney who decides to come home to visit his mother Kate (Fran Drescher) for Christmas together with his best friend Madelyn (Ellen Wong), and soon also his brother Aiden (Chad Connell). Kate is an indefatigable community organizer who feels compelled to lead the way in bringing holiday cheer, complete with time-honored traditions, to the neighborhood and enlists her family and friends in the selfless service to this relentless march in the name of the Christmas spirit. But it also soon becomes apparent that Kate is capable of more than just community organizing. She is also perfectly capable of setting up her sons, in conniving and subtle ways, for romances they don't think about as even plausible. This includes Hugo being forced to consider what he really wants in life, especially when "circumstances" have him reconnecting with his high school crush Patrick (Blake Lee) just as he is being offered a promotion to his firm's office in London. Plus there's the B-plot of the town's train station—traditionally the site of a particularly beloved community Christmas tradition—which is being demolished for future development by the uncaring town aldermen, until Hugo digs deep into its history and not only finds legal real estate loophole, but also a symbolic full-circle of local queer history. The movie does so much, and does it all with infectious lightness of being.
For further reading:
The New York Times: Same-Sex Kisses Under the Mistletoe: Holiday Movies Rethink a Formula
Cinemablend: 9 Christmas Movies Featuring LGBTQ+ Stories
The Washington Post: TV’s Gay Christmas Movies are as Benign, Charming and Cliche as We Always Hoped They’d Be
Esquire: In the Queer Christmas Movie Arena, Predictability Still Outshines Realness
Decider: The Gayest Christmas Ever: Inside 2020’s Big, Queer Holiday Explosion
Advocate: 21 Movies That Queered Christmas
Good Housekeeping: 15 Most Festive LGBTQ Christmas Movies
NPR: Holiday Rom-Coms Go Beyond Diversity To Center New Christmas Stars
The Oprah Magazine: Lifetime's The Christmas Setup Is the LGBTQ Holiday Movie I Never Thought I'd Get to See
CNN: It's a Record Year for LGBTQ Representation in Holiday Movies
Salon: TV's First Crop of Queer Christmas Movies Range From Saccharine Fun to Superficial Flops
Film School Reject: Make the Yuletide Gay: Why We Need More Queer Christmas Movies
Labels: christmas, film, holidays, television
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Monday, November 09, 2020
6:53 AM |
Alex Trebek, 1940-2020
Alex Trebek [1940-2020] was the very soul of
Jeopardy!, the unlikely TV game show that transcended its kind and became a strange amalgam of entertainment and knowledge. Granted, it was a heightened trivia show, but it had the aura of brain-expanding legitimacy akin to avidly poring over volumes of Encyclopedia Brittanica for knowledge's sake. And Trebek was the icon of that knowledge-seeking in a pop cultural realm, his charm a large part of what made
Jeopardy! a huge success. His calm but quick steerage of the process provided a comfortable and cerebral safe harbour in a TV landscape full of Kardashians and Trump. Saddened by this loss. To quote the s.o., "I'd like Things That Make Me Sad for $600, Alex."
Labels: obituary, people, television
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Saturday, September 12, 2020
3:15 AM |
Dame Diana Rigg, 1938–2020
There's a scene in Guy Hamilton's very inventive 1982 adaptation of Agatha Christie's
Evil Under the Sun that made me a Diana Rigg fan forever: she plays a heartless, calculating, and cuckolding actress who would ultimately serve as the murder mystery's requisite inciting incident, and it would have been easy to dislike her immensely—heck, all the characters in the story want to murder her—were it not for one thing: she deploys charm that overwhelms mountains. In this scene in a hotel lobby overlooking the Adriatic Sea, she willfully and glamorously glides into the center of everyone's attention as someone plays the piano, singing Cole Porter's "You're the Top" with the gusto of a true performer and the poison of a vamp with an overwhelming desire to burn all bridges come what may. She uses the lyrics of the song to unleash all sorts of venom directed at specific people—but her glow is so unmistakable that those same people, knowing there is no antidote to her stings, nonetheless cannot help but applaud her. I saw that scene years ago, and I was like, "This woman can do anything. You may want to strangle her, but you also want to kowtow before her." That double-edged appeal has always been at the root of my fawning admiration for Dame Diana—she unleashed that power in everything from
On Her Majesty's Secret Service to
The Avengers to
Game of Thrones. In the latter, for example, you knew her Olenna Tyrell was manipulative and corrupted by her privilege and power—but you also loved her. To be able to limn these contradictions and make meaty roles out of them was her mark. I love Dianna RIgg, present tense, and she will be missed.
Labels: actors, celebrity, film, obituary, people, television
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Wednesday, July 01, 2020
3:00 PM |
Carl Reiner, 1922-2020
I enjoyed the inventive zaniness of the Steve Martin comedies
The Jerk (1979),
Dead Men Don’t Wear Plaid (1982),
The Man With Two Brains (1983), and
All of Me (1984). Can you think of 1980s comedy without these classics? I've always identified them primarily as Steve Martin vehicles that it took me a while to find out there was another genius behind [and sometimes in front of, as well] the camera. Director, writer, and actor Carl Reiner [1922-2020] went for the broad, the absurd, the anarchic -- gleeful of the silly as long as it was believable. He will be remembered for his brand of comedy, for playing a con man in the
Ocean's Eleven films with Steven Soderbergh, and for fathering director Rob Reiner, who also gave us some of the most delightful films ever made.
Labels: comedians, film, obituary, people, television
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Wednesday, June 17, 2020
8:30 PM |
Pinoy BL on the Rise
Wow, just like that. Two new Pinoy BL series, one from Idea First and another one from Black Sheep. I guess
2Gether' the Series's local popularity worked. And don't mention
Sakristan to me. That travesty doesn't exist in my world.
Labels: BL, philippine cinema, queer, television
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Sunday, June 07, 2020
11:33 PM |
F*cking Up Local Journalism
The latest episode of Patriot Act with Hassan Minhaj on Netflix—about the gradual death of local newspapers [reasons: Facebook and Google are sucking up all ad revenues, and private equity firms are bleeding them dry] and the quick spread of lies and fake news through social media [e.g., that horrid Plandemic documentary]—is so enlightening and depressing at the same time.Labels: issues, journalism, television
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Thursday, April 16, 2020
7:14 PM |
"You just have to let people love you."
1. “Sometimes, you just have to let people love you, Marilla.” This was the line in the last episode of the first season of
Anne with an E, Netflix's adaptation of the beloved children’s classic
Anne of Green Gables, that finally did me in: behold, waterworks. The Cuthberts in this episode are in dire financial straits, but Marilla refuses to let people help, which she sees as pity disguised as charity—until Anne spouts this line and changes Marilla’s outlook on things. It touched me. I’ve always had this great suspicion of people daring to love me, you see, perhaps coming from some great unexplored hurt, and ultimately rises within me as a kind of self-defense: “If no one loves me, I won't be hurt.” Which is pretty much why I am so independent in my ways, always skirting the herd, never asking for help. Renz knows this: me asking for help in anything is the last resort I take, arrived at after going through countless detours where I try to just make-do with what I can, on my own. It’s just me being headstrong and proud; it never makes things easier. And so when I finally do ask for help, from friends or family, and help is indeed extended, I am always astonished, like seeing the world in the light of generosity I never knew can exist.
2. The new normal—the world in quarantine because of the coronavirus, with no end in sight—has had most of us reeling with melted hours and indistinguishable days. We sleep, we struggle with sleep, we fret with the news and from the unseen dangers of going outside our doors. We read, we watch movies, we have chilled with Netflix for so long it no longer means “sex.” In the second week of the quarantine, which now feels like ages ago, what got me through the doldrums was all three seasons of
Avatar: The Last Airbender. Now, in the fourth week of the quarantine, I’ve found
Annie with an E. And I think its tenderheartedness and unabashed humanity is just what I need to get through the thickening uncertainty of these dark days. Perhaps I'll watch
The Secret Garden next, and then
A Little Princess. Who knew that the classics I read in childhood would come back to me to offer comfort? Maybe this is even regression, a fanciful escape to more innocent times—but I don’t mind much: whatever gets me through the day, and still believing in the best of humanity, I’ll take it.
Labels: books, coronavirus, life, psychology, television
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Friday, April 03, 2020
7:17 PM |
Swirling Into ‘Devs’
I really thought I’d be giving up on FX’s
Devs after an episode or two drenched in picturesque, overwhelming melancholy—but the TV show has a way of defying my expectations and furthering my curiosity, and so now I’m deeply entrenched into this futuristic world of quantum mechanics and such by the sixth episode. It has an emotional and intellectual resonance HBO’s
Westworld wishes it has, but doesn’t. In many ways, I’m amazed at the evolution of Alex Garland, its creator, who I first discovered while I was studying in Tokyo in the mid-90s and I had stumbled upon his novel
The Beach, and later
The Tesseract. His transition to film has been fascinating, first as a screenwriter [
28 Days Later, Sunshine, 28 Weeks Later, Never Let Me Go]—and now as a director.
Ex Machina (2014) was a glimpse into his concerns as a cinematic storyteller, and his adaptation of Jeff VanderMeer’s
Annihilation (2018) was a sharpening of his sensibilities. I think
Devs is the first full blooming of those sensibilities. I don’t know where this show is going, but I’m here for the ride.
Labels: film, pop culture, television, writers
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Sunday, November 24, 2019
7:20 PM |
Watching The Crown
This is the first time I've actually finished all of
The Crown in one go. [I don't remember going for Season 2 at all, not because it wasn't good -- I gather it was -- but I was much too busy.] But skipping right to Season 3, I'm finding that I'm loving it, if only for the subterfuges of emotion that goes on in Olivia Colman's face as the Queen -- subtle shifts that signal everything from pathos to viciousness. And some of the individual episodes strike a cord with their themes: showing empathy amidst horrific disaster in "Aberfan," recognizing what is important in "Bubbikins," finding your roots and fighting for it in "Tywysog Cymru," dealing with feelings of insignificance in "Moondust," and dealing with heartbreak in "Imbroglio." My favorite relationships in this series are often the ones where total opposites find themselves in common ground: the Queen with her Labour Prime Minister Harold Wilson, and Prince Charles and his nationalist Welsh tutor Edward Millward, and Princess Alice of Battenberg and her unlikely [and fictional] interviewer John Armstrong. I have no idea what this says about me.
Labels: television
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Saturday, November 04, 2017
I will always feel the pain and dark anger of the likes of Alex Forrest, Angelique Bouchard … and Rebecca Bunch. But dear God, this episode of
Crazy Ex-Girlfriend [S03E04] goes dark so deeply, so deliciously. The insanity makes sense.
And I wish that in life there’d be a Josh Groban accosting me in the dark to sing something like:
Life is a gradual series of revelations
That occur over a period of time
It’s not some carefully crafted story
It’s a mess and we’re all gonna die.
If you saw a movie that was like real life
You’d be like, ‘What the hell was that movie about?
It was really all over the place.’
Life doesn’t make narrative sense.
Dear God, this show.
Labels: life, love, music, pop culture, psychology, television
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
Sunday, October 09, 2016
11:16 PM |
Bingeing on 'Friends'
I have no idea what drove me to do it, but I found myself bingeing on all ten seasons of
Friends -- that's ten years worth of shows -- starting about three weeks ago, on and off. Was it needful nostalgia, a longing for my youth in the 90s when things seemed ... simpler? Was it escape from the madness of today? Who the hell knows. But I laughed, and sometimes cringed at the now-dated sexism and body-shaming and homophobia, but mostly had a good time. There's an emotional accessibility to the show that renders it an instant classic, and it has something to do with the generally good writing (except for some horrible misfires like the Rachel/Joey storyline) and cast chemistry. But nostalgia has its limits. At the end of the escape, you have no choice but to turn back to the real world and everything's reality TV sitcom called
Enemies. Bummer.
Labels: issues, life, pop culture, television
[0] This is Where You Bite the Sandwich
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