I was travelling for most of the past two months, so this covers both June and July, and I guess I haven’t been able to watch too much. Maybe? IDK, we’ll see.
Since I was in the US, I took the opportunity to finish watching Voltron: Legendary Defender which only had two seasons available on PH Netflix. Pretty good adaptation, lots of fun callbacks to the old series. Some annoying filler eps, especially in the middle seasons onwards. I like how they spent the entire series going through the main Voltron villains one by one: first Zarkon, then Lotor, then a little bit of Sendak, then finally Hagar. It got a bit too hocus pocus magicky BS near the finale for me, but overall a pretty good watch.
While we were staying with relatives in the US, it turns out they’re really fond of watching Filipino movies. I’m not big on Filipino movies, most of them seem either uninspired, formulaic or outright ridiculous. I did enjoy a couple of the ones that I sat through, at least enough to comment on them, coincidentally both starring Eddie Garcia (RIP). The first one was Rainbow’s Sunset, which has Eddie Garcia playing a senior citizen ex-politician who comes out as gay and explores the repurcussions to his children and grandchildren. This movie had a strange ending that came out of nowhere though. The second movie was Heaven’s Waiting where Garcia portrays an old man who has died and finds himself in a waiting area before he can be sent to heaven, basically purgatory. In this place he finds an old flame of his from his youth, who has secretly been waiting for him all this time, refusing to advance to heaven. The movie explores themes of life and death and love and regret and commitment, but in a context outside of the typical Filipino love team movie.
There were a bunch of other Netflix movies watched - these folks didn’t have that much to do at home - but the only other one I remember sitting through was Murder Mystery starring Adam Sandler and Jennifer Aniston. Basically a comedic whodunnit, it was entertaining enough to sit through, but nothing too special. I did like the car chase scene at the end though.
Aside from watching on Netflix, I also tried out an American cinema and watched Spider-man Far From Home with a friend. I have a separate blog post for it.
Murder Mystery might not have been too special, but it did inspire me to watch the copy I had of Murder on the Orient Express when I got back home. It was my first exposure to Hercule Poirot, and I was pleasantly surprised by the star-studded cast. It’s the sort of movie where you can’t watch it twice though; I suppose all whodunits are like that, but now I can’t watch the older movie based on this book. There’s supposedly a sequel coming out next year, maybe I’ll watch that.
After the trip, there was a whole lot of shows to catch up on. The only one I managed to complete was Jessica Jones S3, the final season among the erstwhile Netflix-Marvel shows. I liked this season, mostly because it went way more dark than I expected and had a very “Criminal Minds”/procedural kind of vibe since her main antagonist here was a serial killer, and one of the themes is how a hero has to play by the rules and can’t just do whatever he wants like killing criminals. (This kind of message always resonates with me now because of where the country is.) While I feel like it might have been better to cap the Netflix-Marvel venture with Daredevil’s fantastic season 3, this one isn’t a bad ending either. I suspect I will do a more detailed look back on these shows soonish.
Like I said, I have a ton of shows to catch up on. Good Omens, Stranger Things, Doom Patrol, Legion, etc to name a few. And I missed out on a few movies though, like Dark Phoenix, which I was tempted to watch in the cinema despite the bad reviews, because I’ve never missed any of the prior X-Men movies, not even Wolverine Origins. Hopefully I’ll have time to catch up on all of this stuff before the Fall TV season comes in!
See Also