Posted inEntertainment

Oscars 2023 was great, but I disagree about Best Picture

I always enjoy watching the Oscars show, and this year was no exception. I liked having a host back on stage. The tag-team approach I recall from last year didn't work as well as Jimmy Kimmel providing a continuous presence -- for the whole 3 1/2 hours or so of the 3-hour show. One thing I've learned is to always add an hour to our DVR recording time, which came in handy this year. The way I see it, watching the Oscars is a lot like watching sports. If you have a favorite team, you're going to root for them…
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I didn’t like “Everything Everywhere All at Once.” I have company.

After learning that Everything Everywhere All at Once got eleven Oscar nominations, I wanted to see this movie. Through the good graces of Apple TV, I found that I could watch it at no cost on the Showtime App, courtesy of our DirecTV subscription that includes Showtime. After spending 132 minutes watching the movie over a span of several days and finishing it tonight, that was exactly how much the movie was worth to me. Nothing. Or at least, very little. Though there were brief periods at the beginning and end of Everything where I felt connected to the characters…
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Posted inCurrent affairs Entertainment

Bill Maher has become an irritating purveyor of liberal myths

I've been watching Bill Maher ever since his Politically Incorrect days. When he turned up on HBO with his Real Time With Bill Maher, twenty seasons ago, I watched him there. I still enjoy Maher. But the past few seasons, and maybe longer than that, Maher often acts like a caricature of a one-time liberal who now takes excessive pleasure in attacking what he believes are overly "woke" Democratic/progressive positions. I've got no problem with Maher doing that, so long as he doesn't twist the truth to make his point. Which, he does with disturbing regularity. Last Friday's Real Time…
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Posted inEntertainment

Streaming shows I liked (but you may not)

We're all different. That's a truism. But this doesn't stop me from wanting to share streaming shows I've watched recently on Netflix, Apple TV+, and Hulu that appealed to me a lot, in hopes that maybe others would like them as much as I did. Here they are. Slow Horses - Apple TV+This is a British spy series with an appealing twist. The MI5 agents who are the centerpiece of the show are castoffs sentenced to spy-world purgatory for misdeeds they committed. So they haven't been fired, just consigned to live out their days doing usually boring menial work in…
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Posted inEntertainment

My liberal defense of Yellowstone, the Paramount show

When it comes to my TV watching, I care a lot more about entertainment than political correctness. This explains why liberal me, who was unalterably opposed to the Bush administration's use of torture during the so-called War on Terror, could cheer on Jack Bauer in the 24 series when he'd use the cord of a table lamp to shock a suspected terrorist into divulging details of a dirty bomb threat. It also explains why I'm a huge fan of Yellowstone, the Paramount series now in Season 5, even though a TIME magazine story asked a pertinent question in its title:…
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Posted inEntertainment Humor

Taylor Tomlinson’s stand-up comedy heals my frazzled psyche

My big problem with life is... (drumroll please)... LIFE.  Meaning, insofar as I know what I mean, but now that I just wrote this blog's topic sentence, I'm stuck with explaining it, no matter how many problems get fixed in my life, new ones pop up like a perpetual motion machine designed by a sadist. I suspect most people feel this way. So what are we to do?  Sex, drugs, and rock-and-roll only can take us so far, especially if we're (OK, me) so old, sex is starting to  look like the car that zipped by in the other lane…
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Posted inEntertainment

RRR is a terrific action movie about India under British domination

I just finished watching RRR -- "Rise Roar Revolt" -- a movie from India on Netflix that's a mind-blowing three-hour combination of action, thriller, romance, dance, superhero, and probably other genres that I could recall if my mind wasn't in such a blown state. (It's got English captioning, and quite a bit of the dialogue is in English.) I loved RRR. India fascinates me. I've visited the country twice and was a devotee of an Indian guru for 35 years, which led to me spending a lot of time around people from India. So when I read about the movie…
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Posted inEntertainment

The shows I love to stream tell a lot about me

After writing the title to this blog post, I had a strong feeling of obviousness wash over me. OK, so be it. I plead guilty to stating the obvious. What people like to watch on TV says a lot about them. So does the music they like to listen to. So do the books and magazines they like to read.  Still, I find it fascinating how our personality gets projected into those sorts of activities. It's almost as if we don't need to meditate, engage in psychotherapy, or stare into the darkness of a coffee house expresso to know our…
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Posted inCurrent affairs Entertainment

Oscars blow it by a pitifully minor mention of Ukraine

Tonight's Oscars show was viewed around the world. It used to get hundreds of millions of watchers. Maybe that's less now. Regardless, both those who put on the Oscars and those who won awards blew it by failing to take a much stronger stand in support of Ukraine against Russia's unprovoked invasion. I watched every minute of the show. I kept waiting for someone -- a presenter, an award winner, anyone -- to make some impassioned remarks about the bravery of the Ukrainian people and the need for freedom lovers everywhere to support their battle against Russia. Instead, all we…
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Posted inEntertainment Salem

I liked Dave Chappelle’s Netflix show, transgender jokes and all

Usually a joke is just a joke. Let's not over-think it, folks. Standup comedians are supposed to push the boundaries of what's socially acceptable. And, naturally, be funny doing so. Dave Chappelle's new Netflix show, "The Closer," succeeds on both counts in my obviously personal opinion. Others disagree. That's fine. If they feel that Chappelle was unduly nasty toward the LGBTQ community, with his special focus on transgender people, they're entitled to their own obviously personal opinion. Me, I don't expect comedians to be paragons of virtue. I want them to make me laugh, cause me to look at life in…
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Posted inEntertainment

“The Chair” is a great look at college free speech

I know some retired Willamette University professors who would love "The Chair" on Netflix. This is a short (three hour) series that covers a lot of ground: college politics, free speech/cancel culture, how minorities are treated in academia. My wife and I liked it a lot. Sandra Oh, who I came to know and love in "Killing Eve," has a very different role here as Ji-Yoon Kim, the new chair of the English Department at a smallish university. She's terrific, as are all the other actors, notably including Everly Carganilla, who plays Kim's adopted daughter.  Though by far the youngest…
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Posted inEntertainment Film

Summer of Soul — great movie about 1969’s Black Woodstock

Last night, via Hulu, my wife and I finished watching Summer of Soul, a hugely entertaining movie about the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival that featured outdoor concerts with musicians such as... Stevie Wonder, Nina Simone, Sly and the Family Stone, Gladys Knight and the Pips, Mahalia Jackson, B.B. King, and The Fifth Dimension. It's been called the Black Woodstock. However, a big difference is that Woodstock, which also happened in 1969, became a cultural phenomenon, with a movie about the festival coming out just a year later in 1970. By contrast, footage of the Harlem Cultural Festival sat untouched for…
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Posted inEntertainment Film

“In the Heights” shows joy of belonging to a community

Today I praised the In the Heights movie to someone who hadn't heard of it. They pulled out their phone and told me the film's Rotten Tomatoes ratings: 96% positive for critics, 95% positive for viewers. I said, "I'm surprised it wasn't 100%."  In the Heights is that good. My wife and I watched it at home via our HBO Max subscription. It's showing at Regal Willamette Town Center and Regal Santiam here in Salem, plus the Independence Theater. It looked and sounded fine on our TV. I'm sure it would look and sound even better on a really big screen.…
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Posted inEntertainment Home life

How to get voice recognition working on LG TV

I'm enjoying our new LG television, which we got about two weeks ago. So far there's only been one glitch, and one annoyance. The glitch was the voice recognition button on the remote for our OLED55C1PUB model stopping working, after it functioned fine initially.  I kept getting the error message, "A temporary issue has occurred while attempting to connect to the server. Please try again later. (200)" But after later arrived, the voice recognition button still didn't work.  A phone call to LG customer support led to a solution, though it took quite a while (three transfers) before I finally…
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Posted inEntertainment Home life

Our new LG TV has artificial intelligence. But I hold the remote.

Jim Ramsey, a long-time friend, deserves a commission from Salem's Video Only store.  When I told Jim that I'd just bought the newly released Apple TV device that streams Netflix, Amazon Prime, and a whole lot more in 4K, he said, "But now you need a 4K television." Well, damn. I hadn't thought of that.  We had a Samsung television that was working fine, though it had started to seem a bit dated. But until we ditched our crappy CenturyLink DSL, the only so-called "broadband" option out here in rural south Salem, for the hugely faster Starlink satellite internet (thank…
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Posted inEntertainment

Worst Academy Awards show ever

Every year I look forward to the Academy Awards show. I should have reversed direction this year and looked backward to previous shows that were actually entertaining.  This was the first time I fast-forwarded through much of the interminable three-plus hours, because I wanted the damn thing to end so I could do something enjoyable. Whoever came up with the atrociously bad concept for the 2021 Academy Awards should be drummed out of Hollywood forever.  It wouldn't take me long to Google who that person (or people) was. But I found the show so uninteresting, I can't summon up the…
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Posted inEntertainment Film

“The Great” is, well, great! Here’s why I liked it.

My wife and I came late to The Great, an engrossing ten-episode series on Hulu that is (very) roughly based on the story of Catherine the Great, Empress of Russia.  It was released on May 15, 2020. We discovered it last month after looking for something else on Hulu, noticing The Great, and having my wife say, "I've heard it's pretty good." From that moment we watched The Great almost every night until we finished the last episode yesterday. Thankfully, Season 2 is in the works, because we loved the show. It's like nothing else I've ever seen -- not…
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Posted inEntertainment Film

The Prom is a great feel-good movie (ignore The New Yorker)

Hah! A seventy-two year old father, me, showed in one instance he's more culturally with it than his forty-eight year old daughter, Celeste.  Usually Celeste has seen, or at least heard of, cinematic offerings before me. After all, she lives in Orange County, which is a lot closer to Hollywood than I am here in Oregon. But in a post-Christmas FaceTime call this afternoon, I asked Celeste if she had seen The Prom yet. No, she hadn't. And it appears she wasn't even aware of this Netflix production. I highly enjoyed The Prom. So did my wife. I don't get…
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Posted inEntertainment

Here’s why I loved The Queen’s Gambit on Netflix

At first I doubted Jim Ramsey, a friend who I have coffee with most Sundays, when he said I should watch The Queen's Gambit -- a seven-episode Netflix mini-series about, yawn, a girl who plays chess.  That unduly confident "yawn" was the reason it took me a week or two to say to my wife one evening, let's take a look at The Queen's Gambit to see if we might like it. Well, we sure did.  Every night after that we watched another hour-long episode. Yesterday we reached the end of our immersion into the ever-so-fascinating story of Beth Harmon,…
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Posted inEntertainment Home life

DIRECTV back to its irritating channel-losing ways

I'd say that I have a love-hate relationship with DIRECTV, but that wouldn't be honest. My DIRECTV relationship is almost entirely based on hate. I hate how much our monthly subscription costs. I hate how shows we've recorded mysteriously disappear from our DVR (digital video recorder). I hate that the Pac-12 Networks aren't carried.  And I hate it when DIRECTV engages in a corporate pissing match with the owner of one of the channels that we've paid to get, yet is at risk of being taken off the DIRECTV lineup for reasons that are never specifically disclosed but which obviously…
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