Monday Media Musings - 12/2/19

[owlmoose]

Arrowverse update: Not much to say about The Flash this week. Arrow, on the other hand... Can I just tell you how incredibly refreshing it was to see a time loop story in which 1. the affected characters immediately understand that they're in a time loop and 2. the characters not caught in the loop immediately believe it when they're told what's happening?? No time wasted on endless explanations or loops that don't advance the plot at all. I literally cannot think of another example of this trope where it goes down like that. And I'm a big fan of time loop stories. So I was overall pretty pleased with this episode, until the end where the answer is for Oliver to accept his ultimate fate. I'm still fairly convinced that Mar Novu is the bad guy, but I guess we'll see what happens.

Toy Story 4: I was among the camp that believed Toy Story 3 was the perfect ending to this movie series and a fourth movie couldn't possibly add to the story in any useful way. But I'm backing down from that now, for two reasons. First, Forky was a delight, and I'm so pleased he exists. Second, the direction they took with Woody and his journey to finding a new purpose was ultimately more satisfying than where the third movie left him. (And it was great that Bo Peep got a lot more to do this time.) One aspect of the movie really didn't work for me, though, and that was the lengths to which the toys had to go to influence the behavior of the humans.

Knives Out: You've probably been hearing a lot of hype about this movie. I'm here to tell you that it is 100% true. This was a great, great movie, with a stellar cast, beautiful cinematography and production design, a sharp script, and some scathing political commentary. Anything else I could say was already said better by Jenny over at Reading the End, so I refer you to her review if you want to read more (note, that review thoroughly spoils the movie, so don't read if you don't want to know). I really want to see it again.