Eloise's Thoughts and Fancies

I don’t think most of this season it’s as funny as the first two seasons but that might be me. And that’s not to say it’s not funny. I laughed, out loud despite being alone, at every episode usually several times. I took to watching from a recording because I frequently laughed so hard I couldn’t hear what was going on and I wanted to be able to pause/rewind easily. It’s not like it’s unfunny all of a sudden, I think it just slides off to a different place that doesn’t work for me. As usual the music is really on point and it was great to relive some of those tunes. They play with the format of the show too: we have a flashback episode, a road trip episode and more. I don’t mind that but maybe that contributed a bit to my feeling of it not quite hitting the mark. Setting up the mechanics of the different episodes chewed into the time available for the cast to do their thing. Then came the finale. An hour long special, set a year later building up to the referendum on the peace agreem...

Cracow Monsters is, as you might guess from the title, a Polish show that’s on Netflix. Wikipedia bills it as horror but it’s much more in a dark modern mythology area than a traditional horror. It’s definitely about the conflict between good and evil but on a cosmic, rather than a human or human-adjacent monster scale. That doesn’t mean it doesn’t have some horror-style moments but they’re not the main thrust of the story, the focus. This show comes with a spate of trigger warnings for sexual scenes, suicide, drug misuse and some others. Broadly speaking all of those are accurate but, honestly, it’s pretty mild stuff. One of the warnings is for sexual violence and I’m left wondering what it was for to be honest. It should be far too easy to dismiss this series. It’s relatively simple to watch and, without even really analysing, spot a bucket load of tropes. We literally have a club for misfit kids with superpowers run by a professor for example. Sound familiar? A character that wea...

I need to say a couple of things before I dive into the review proper. I’m far from a Marvel A/V Universe completist. I haven’t seen anything on Disney+, although I have an idea of broad plot outlines, and I haven’t seen all the movies either. From what I understand, and what I know of WandaVision that might make a huge difference to how you react to this film. I’ve also become increasingly disappointed with core MCU films (that formula is super restrictive in terms of the story structure, changing the character and retelling the same story doesn’t make it more interesting to me) and more and more a fan of those that hard core MCU fans dislike. Not necessarily uncritically, I thought Eternals needed to be a miniseries not a film for example, but overall I enjoyed it, where most MCU fans hated it. But I’m going to review based on my viewing experience. YMMV. I’m going to start by saying contradictory things. This film, at 126 minutes, felt too long, certainly longer than The Northma...

The Northman is a Norse saga brought to the big screen. If you don’t really know what that means, I would brace yourself, it’s a rather different sort of storytelling than your typical Hollywood movie, even though it’s pretty heavily focussed on a leading man. While there are action scenes, you should possibly go in thinking Shakespearean tragedy more than than Die Hard (although the language is much more modern than most Shakespeare you see on screen) and you should mix that with a big dose of interacting with the Gods, vision questing and the like, and what I’m loosely going to call swords and sandals combat scenes. This is historically wrong (and while I quibble about the size of their shields, they get the history of the combat pretty decent) but it sets the right sort of mental image. This makes it quite trippy in quite a few places, and maybe thinking Rambo crossed with Hamlet on acid gets you closer to the right place - there’s a strong revenge thread running though this s...

Wales v Italy It should probably be no surprise that a game between two sides with much better defences than attacks is low scoring. Especially when Wales, who for the first 20 minutes, had been looking the more adventurous, had two women sent to the bin within a minute of so. Honestly I’m surprised they didn’t both see red, which would really have changed the game. Wales, unsurprisingly, slowed the game down to try and manage their numerical disadvantage but it never really sparked back into life once they returned. You sometimes see games that are described as “neither side wanted to lose.” I don’t think that’s really fair here - it was more a case that both sides base their success on defence and the attacking side is a work in progress. However, it certainly looked a lot like neither side wanted to lose. Congratulations to Italy who kicked slightly better than Wales, so they won 10-8. However, the losing bonus point means Wales were guaranteed third spot, which took some jeopa...