Rewinds and Rebounds - Friday Video Distractions with Mike Norton

 

     A week of frosty challenges for many of us, if the weekend is a refuge for you I hope you're reaching it quickly and safely.

     This week my video viewing's been primarily a rewind, as I've been continuing through my rewatch of Babylon 5 (five seasons on HBO Max), and going back through the brilliant and personally-beloved pastiche that is Venture Bros. (via their feed on Hulu, where all seven seasons of the unfortunately cancelled series waits) - and doing both more aggressively than originally intended. I'm already on episode 9 of season 4 of B5, and a few episodes into season 5 of VB. In avoiding things I should be doing, I have little restraint! My life is very much out of balance, but I'm enjoying the shows.

     I've also done another rewatch of the first 6 episodes of WandaVision (Disney+) in the run-up to this week's no.7. After that, just two weeks to go in this 9-part series.
     They've been raising the bar each week since the close of episode two, so I'm trying to savor it while also being pulled ahead in anticipation of where matters will stand by the close of the series. With something so driven by magical thinking it's utterly uncertain what's going to come out of all this.

     One quick follow-up to last week's piece: Episode two of Clarice (CBS, Thursdays, 10PM Eastern) continued to work well, building on what happened in episode one, developing the characters and the dynamics between them, while presenting a discrete, new challenge for the week.
     I hope they continue through the season in much the same way, allowing Clarice and the team she's part of to move through a world where true serial killers are the rare exception, while most of the threats are simply agendas and a system that eschews any purity of moral vision, much less a straight and clean path to justice. I liked that the note of seeming moral victory in the closing scene of episode one became a lesson folded back on Starling in the second. It's too soon to tell who's going to end up teaching who over the longer distance.
    Premiering today on Netflix is what I'm hoping will be a cathartic film, I Care a Lot, as a predator becomes prey -- with what seems to be a terrific cast.

    Hopefully I won't look back on the trailer as having given too much away.
     Still a couple weeks away on March 5th will be the premiere on Amazon Prime of a sequel... I'm not entirely sure should have been made: Coming 2 America.

     The 1988, R-rated (the sequel's PG-13) original will hit 33 near the end of June, a milestone that

sends me back even farther, to Catholic high school, when such a birthday was loosely taken as a crucifixion-appropriate age. Hmm.
     I haven't watched Coming To America in many years, but it was very familiar back in the day, and one of those pop cultural sources of running jokes with my wife -- for some reason. She always seemed to enjoy it. As I roll back over it in my mind I'm increasingly sure it won't have aged well, but it was a creature of its time, and I'd be best to remember that. That's currently available on Prime, too, so I'll try to work a rewatch of that in somewhere in the next couple weeks.
     If it all turns out poorly aged, I can revisit another film Eddie Murphy did, back in 2019, when he was launching what seems to be the general, career-rejuvenating arc he's still traveling, and the above mentioned sequel was still a project in the offing.
 
    I want to mix the focus and content up in these pieces more than I've mostly been doing. In part I keep coming back to simultaneously wanting to note things I've been watching and am interested in getting to soon after they appear, as I know I'm not the only one looking for things to watch, be they new, new to me, or something I'd simply forgotten. I'll figure something out.

     In the meantime I'm starting to work up some alternate, themed pieces. I've done a few of them for the C7 blog before, but it's probably been a while. An early one was looking back on the first R-rated movies I saw, in outings with my mom when I was 10 or so, and another was thinking back to the long-vanished theaters I saw movies in during my first 20-30 years - I'm linking each of those (from the first year of the blog) without rereading them; I don't need to invite myself to go back for what are probably badly needed rewrites.
     If nothing else, the themed pieces will give me something to drop in if I run out of time some week, as they're less likely to be time-sensitive.
     I hope wherever you find yourself this winter week you're keeping warm, fed and comfortable. See you next week! - Mike