I made it through (I think) three episodes before bailing. Maybe you’ll get farther.
Yes… the commercials have gotten much worse. If I can’t skip the commercial, I’ll mute it and play on my Chromebook for 60-90 seconds.
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Sunshine loves rom-coms, so I’ll pick up a used DVD from Goodwill on half price day. 65 cents for a movie that she’ll watch over and over again is a steal.
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I use Firefox as my browser with DuckDuckGo as my search engine and that seems to keep the commercials on YouTube at bay. At least for the moment.
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Been blowing through Snowfall for the last week or so. I’m about to start Season 5 (Out of 6, I think). It really reminds me of some of the shows I have really loved in the past like Homicide and The Wire… The tension continues to ratchet up and the problems fall like dominos…on top of the characters. Anyone else enjoy this show?
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We started it last night. Diverting and inoffensive and we’ll probably cruise through the rest of the episodes tonight.
I added value to the experience by frequently pausing it to explain to H how this version differed from the movie. I sure he appreciated this. 
I really enjoyed Snowfall. Damson Idris was fantastic! The actor that played Avi Drexler just passed away the other day.
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Yes…I was just talking to a co-worker about that… 60 is waaaaaay to young…
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Things I’ve watched recently:
Superman (2025)
I was really, really happy that this was as good as it was. Looking forward to owning it on physical media.
Opus (2025) - saw this on the plane ride home and mostly enjoyed it. Content that involves cults always make me really uncomfortable and this was no different. Always enjoy John Malkovitch, too.
Neighborhood Watch (2025)
Jeffery Dean Morgan and Jack Quaid are a retired security officer and a recently released, emotionally unstable patient hunting for a kidnapped young woman. Think Midnight Run, but way darker.
K-Pop Demon Hunters (2025)
The Buffy and Dr. Horrible musicals walked so K-Pop Demon Hunters could run. Lots of fun!
Hoping to see the new Fantastic Four soon!
Twin Peaks - The Return (2017) - dir. David Lynch
In 2012, David Lynch got together with Mark Frost and began working on a final season of Twin Peaks, the groundbreaking show from 1989-90, as well as the followup film Fire Walk With Me. They were promted to do so because the very last exchange between Laura Palmer and Agent Dale Cooper at the end of season 2 was “I’ll see you again in 25 years…” and that time was approaching. It took a bit of extra time, but even so, in 2017, Showtime put out Twin Peaks - The Return. I’d never seen it 'til now. I wasn’t really sure what to expect.
There’s a lot of ways to think about this season. Maybe the most difficult and frankly least rewarding is attempting to “figure out” what the story of it all means. But, really, David Lynch has never really been interested in plot. Movies have plots, because you need a reason to move from one scene to another, but Lynch has alwyas been much more concerned with emotional truth. He doesn’t want you to think about his work so much as feel about it. His most “Lynch-ian” films, Lost Highway, Inland Emprie, Mulholland Drive, are all focused much more on emotional impressions than character A working out conflict with character B and circumstance C. Some folks have suggested that Twin Peaks was about TV, and warped, inverted, and deconstructed all the 80’s soap opera dramas like Dynasty and Dallas. Fire Walk with Me did the same trick, only with psychological thriller that hit big in the early 90’s, with films like Silence of the Lambs. Now The Return is tearing down the idea of the Prestige-Cable-Drama-About-Difficult-Men ™, shows like Breaking Bad, Mad Men, The Sopranos, The Shield, etc. And all these deconstructions are meant to recenter the HUMANS at the center of these stories. Twin Peaks is about how death ISN’T resolved after a single episode, how satisfying answers aren’t always available. Fire Walk With Me doesn’t center the police investigation of Laura’s death, it centers the emotional damage that lead up to it and that it left behind. Return steadfastly refuses to give the audience the thing they THINK they want, a deep dive into the further adventures of Dale Cooper, FBI. Instead, it’s withheld, and we still are dealing with, and eventually, recenter around Laura, the person who died, the one we SHOULD be concerned with, and should have been concerned with all along.
The Return isn’t satisfying in the traditional way. And it’s not trying to be. But what IS immensily satisfying is watching Lynch interact with almost everyone who has been important to him and his art over the course of his career. A huge percentage of the cast and crew are people he has worked with repeatedly over the years, Kyle MacLachlan, Laura Dern, Grace Zabrisky, the list just goes on and on. And much of the run time is taken up by long, silent takes of people just being in one another’s presence. Sometimes this makes things odd and otherworldly, sometimes awkwardly hilarious, but always in a way that contributes to the larger feel of a scene. Lynch was suffering from emphysema for many years before his death. While he never made a formal announcement of it 'til much later, I think he knew that his days were numbered, and The Return was him being able to make the art he loved with all of his friends one last time. and spend as much time with them as possible. And lucky us, we get to see it, too. In fact, for a shocking number of the cast and crew, this would be their last ever project. Miguel Ferrer, Harry Dean Stanton, and, of course, Catherine “The Log Lady” Coulson, all passed during or shortly after production. , Coulson had been Lynch’s collaborator since Eraserhead, where she served as assistant director and camera operator. She was actually dying of cancer, and passed in 2015. Lynch wrote her part and filmed it only weeks before her passing including all her scenes posthumously. To say her scenes are heart wrenching is an understatement of unfathomable proportions.
It’s 18 hour long episodes. Some have huge wordless sequences of abstract images. and white noise. There is no easy resolution, no final bow that wraps up all the mystical goings on in Twin Peaks. Instead, it’s one last, grand gesture by a man who more than anything seemed to want us to be motivated by our hearts more than our heads.
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Together (2025) - dir. Michael Shanks
Thirty-something NYC couple Tim (Dave Franco) and Milly (Allison Brie) are… not doing great. Milly has taken a teaching job upstate, dragging Tim away from the city and his musical not-quite-career. They both recognize something is wrong, but neither is strong enough to actually say anything.
Now, given that set up, and the fact that this movie is titled Together, and it’s being touted as “the next big body horror hit after The Substance”, it’s not hard to figure out where this is going. To its credit, it KNOWS this, so every kiss, every touch of skin to skin becomes an exercise in dread. I mean, there’s a Chekov’s Sawz-All, ferpetesake.
I think the marketers were trying to emphasize the “body horror” aspects (and they are EXTREMELY well done), but drawing a comparison to The Substance was a mistake. That film is in a whole different class. This is a very well executed horror movie, with some interesting twists. The Substance was a stylistic tour-de-force and grabbed you (or, at least me) in a way that this film simply was never going to do.
Now, don’t misunderstand. This is a perfectly good summer horror flick. Even very good, in parts. If its messaging gets a little muddled towards the end, well, the big final sequence is more “fascinating” than “cringe inducing”, but that’s a lot of fun, too. Sometimes, you don’t have to wince to have a good time.
3.5 of 5 red flags just waving out there in the breeze, being ignored by everyone.
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I finished watching Your Friends and Neighbours, not bad. Way too many sexy scenes for me, and I ain’t no prude. Seems like they were just trying to fill some boring scenes. John Hamm was good. 6/10.
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Said same to my wife when we were watching it. Didn’t need it.
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Jon Hamm is great. Can’t wait to see him in The Naked Gun, even tho nobody will ever surpass Leslie Nielsen.
He’s everywhere!
Not in my house he ain’t. 
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You will be happy to hear that Jon Hamm is, in fact, NOT going to be in The Naked Gun, bc I had a total brain fart.
It’s Liam Neeson who will be playing Frank Drebin. Duh.
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You’re obviously way too smitten with the Hammster 
He’s a cutie for sure. Smart, funny, handsome. What’s not to like?
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A modern day Cary Grant…
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