Monday Media Musings - 2/3/20

Arrowverse update: Winn returns! Also, oh BRAINY my HEART i can't TAKE IT ( Supergirl and Batgirl thoughts )

The Arrow series finale gets its own paragraph ( and its own spoiler cut tag )

The Good Place series finale: This deserves its own post, which I swear I will write soon. Beautiful, satisfying, I wonder how much of it was planned form the beginning.

Little Women (2019): I've probably read the book dozens of times, but I've actually never seen any of the other film adaptations, not even the one with Winona Ryder as Jo. I enjoyed this version very well -- for the most part I found it very faithful to the book, and the changed chronology was effective, especially in how it highlighted the way the March sisters grew and changed, and the ways in which they didn't. Stellar, stellar cast (although I always have a hard time taking Timothee Chalamet seriously as an adult), I loved the meta narrative of the framing device and especially the ending, and Greta Gerwig was, indeed, robbed.

Superbowl LIV: I've talked in this space before about my sports fandom history -- I grew up watching the big three pro sports with my dad, but the only interest I maintained on my own was baseball. Of the three, I'm typically the least interested in professional gridiron football, mostly because the NFL is without question the most evil of all the pro sports organizations. And yet, the Superbowl remains a significant cultural event, T has always been interested in the commercials, and the 49ers were playing this year, so we ended up watching, more or less, although we fast forwarded through significant chunks of the game, all the preshow and halftime commentary, and a good chunk of the halftime show. As Superbowl games go, it was one of the more interesting ones -- although it became more of an exercise in "let's see how Kansas City manages to come back and win this", because we had the outcome spoiled by an Apple News alert on T's iPad near the end of the third quarter. Not a bad crop of commercials -- naturally I enjoyed the Chris Evans appearance; other favorites included the Wal-Mart one with all the spaceships and Cobie Smulders's Toyota ad -- although many were dull, jingoistic, borderline offensive, and the NFL's big "fuck you" to Colin Kaepernick was pretty enraging. Anyway, it was a relatively entertaining way to spend an evening, and now I can go back to not particularly caring about football for another year.