Eloise's Thoughts and Fancies

In season one it wasn’t obvious that we had a classic sit com, but season two makes it much more obvious. That might be a deliberate change. Season one had three women at college under pressure to deliver a final year project and they came up with an app to help women have better sex, did a load of research and got something that worked. The comedy came from the situation of these women doing research into sexual behaviour at university - a bit like Sex Education they didn’t make fun of anyone for how they expressed desire but if you imagine setting up a safe space for people to have sex and then asking questions about it, there’s lots of room for comedy around that, which they use. In season two, they’ve moved on a bit, the Sexify App is ready to be launched, then all their bills come due and their power gets cut off… an apparent angel rescues them, but demands double the user base - so the drive for Sexiguy, a male version of the app begins. (The angel is not all she appears to be...

Blonde is a deeply uncomfortable, even unpleasant, film built around a mesmerising performance that a little bit of me hopes wins Ana de Armas best actress at the Oscars, although I’ll be happy if she loses to Michelle Yeoh. Although Marilyn died three years before I was born, as I was growing up, certainly when I was a child, she was still the epitome of a sex symbol. Even into my teens that was the case, although by the end of them other women were starting to displace her. So, although I never really studied her life, most of the events loosely depicted here are part of my cultural baggage. I certainly didn’t understand it all the first time I heard some of the stories, but by the time I was 14 or so and I was hearing them for the fifth time I was old enough to understand what they meant, maybe not in the context of the the America of 30 years earlier, but at least to understand what an abortion was, what the drugs stories meant, what being a Playboy centrefold implied and so on. ...

Yesterday (17/1/23) the UK Government took the previously unprecedented, but legally created at the time of devolution, step of using Article 35 to refuse a bill passed by the Scottish Government to go forward for Royal Assent. This stops it becoming law. It should be noted that there are other options, I’m not sure of the exact number, I think it’s Article 33, but if there are laws passed by the Scottish Parliament and the UK Parliament thinks they have a problem at law, they can - and have - used this to challenge them in the Supreme Court (and its predecessor) and have sometimes forced either clarification or amendment of the law. You have to wonder why they didn’t take that route this time. Their critics wonder if it’s simply because they know they’d lose. Now, I’m not a lawyer, I’m not going to get into the weeds about this law proposed by the Scottish Parliament. If I did, I would certainly miss things. As I understand it - and my understanding is based largely on a statement b...

The very short review of this film is “gorgeous but WTF was that?” I have read, although a long time ago, a translation of the book (which was the first complete release of the story) and, like a lot of fairy stories, the original is a LOT darker than the Disney movie for example (although some of the weird bits of the Disney film come from the book more or less intact), and some of that darkness comes through clearly. The scene where Pinocchio first comes to life felt pretty familiar for example and, perhaps unsurprisingly for a 19th century Italian story, the heavy Catholicism in this adaptation felt familiar too. However, I’m pretty sure Collodi didn’t predict the first and second world wars, the rise of Mussolini and the like, but Il Duce is a character we see as del Toro's obsession with fascism coming through. This takes the story into almost pure del Toro, I say almost pure because there are easter eggs from the original thrown in. Why is the boy Pinocchio befriends calle...

There’s a totally spoiler-free review which is facile, and a mostly spoiler free review that still gives plenty to enjoy but gives some more context. First up, spoiler-free: Hot Brazilian lesbians. Enjoy. We’re left on a cliffhanger so I hope there will be another season (they made a Christmas special, which is officially listed as a second season) but I’m not sure. This is a tiny web show and whether they can make another season or they’ll move on to another project remains to be seen. Also, a friendly warning: you’ll be using subtitles unless your conversational Brazilian Portuguese is really up to speed. I speak just enough classical Portuguese to recognise a tiny amount of what they’re saying and, now, to recognise more words that have deviated from what I learnt. But there’s absolutely no way I can follow what’s going on here, it really is odd words, and I probably wouldn’t have started to catch them without the subtitles. Mild Spoilers from here on We start with a group of f...

CAUTION: SPOILERS Although this is going to sound critical, it’s really not. While I don’t really rank my TV shows when I do my recap of the year because I find it really hard across such diversity of shows, genres and so on, Wednesday was certainly one of my favourites. However, if you’re going to be picky, as a piece of TV it’s unusually told with a lot of really convenient coincidences and fewer, but enough to be a noticeable pattern, excised scenes that contain pretty important information. There’s another point too, but we’ll come back to that later, because it’s unique and hard to call a pattern. Let’s start with a really huge example of the really convenient coincidences. Enid has been struggling to transform, it’s a huge thing for her - she fights with her mother about it, and although she gets support from her father, it’s still distressing. But, when Wednesday is fighting the Hyde form of Tyler, Thing can not only direct Enid straight to the spot they’re fighting in middl...

Hot Skull is, obviously, a Turkish TV dystopian drama. Couldn’t you tell from the title? One of the things I love about Netflix is that they bring shows from other cultures to us. Squid Game, Dark, Lupin, Cracow Monsters, Biohackers, Sexify, Dark Desires, the Rain, Queen of the South, 3% and more are all shows I’ve seen and largely enjoyed from around the world courtesy of Netflix. Even when they haven’t necessarily been great TV (I’m not going to name names here), it’s usually great to see how other cultures create their stories. In particular, four of those, along with Hot Skull are dystopian series (I might have a type, and Netflix might make good predictions of that) but once you strip away the “this is our disaster, this is how we’re coping” there is still a chunk of “and this is how (in the case of Hot Skull ) Turks view a dystopia that is different to Germans, Poles, Danes, Koreans and, of course, Brits (and in cases not listed Americans). To me those differences are fascina...

The Sandman (S1) Wednesday (S1) Warrior Nun (S2) Slow Horses (S1) Severance (S1) Dr Who (Specials) Motherland Fort Salem (S4) First Kill (S1) Derry Girls (S3) Cracow Monsters (S1 and only?) All of us are Dead (S1) Killing Eve (S4) The Ipcress File (one season special) A Discovery of Witches (S3) The Witcher (S2) Foundation (S1) Hot Skull Conversations with Friends (one season special) Stranger Things (S4) This is not an exhaustive list of the TV I watched this year, it’s a list of the TV I was moved to review this year which is not the same. I’m aware of at least a couple of shows I watched all the way through that I didn’t review for various reasons. There are all a number of shows that I started and didn’t finish, which I guess is a review of its own to some extent, but they’re not listed here. As is usual, this list is not really ranked. While it might be possible to rank Warrior Nun and Wednesday against each other, how do you rank either of those against The Sandman or S...

Everything Everywhere, All at Once Avatar: The Way of Water Top Gun: Maverick The Northman Love and Leashes The Batman The Woman King Thor: Love And Thunder Don’t Worry Darling Jurassic World: Dominion D.E.B.S. The Half of It Dr. Strange in the Multiverse of Madness Elvis Licorice Pizza Don’t Look Up I only saw 16 films this year, that includes two that are old films that I caught up on. I have a few lurking on my Netflix list to watch as well that I will get around to eventually. That’s not the lowest number of films I’ve seen since I started this list, but it is way down. There are a mix of reasons for that, changes in my domestic life, fewer films I want to see (there are some really long gaps between good films being released at the cinema this year) and, like a sizeable chunk of people, I’m not so good at sitting down at home to watch a movie. I’m much more likely to watch an episode or two of whatever the latest show I’m hooked on might be. Two episodes might be the same ...