Monday Media Musings - 2/3/20

[owlmoose]

Arrowverse update: Winn returns! Also, oh BRAINY my HEART i can't TAKE IT That scene between Brainy and Winn was just. Oh. I really, really want this to pay off in the long run. If it does, it will satisfy so many of my favorite ship tropes. But I hope, when Nia takes him back (if Nia takes him back), it doesn't come too easily. Because damn that whole thing was brutal. Anyway I really enjoyed the return of Winn. Am officially a little grumpy about William as love interest, but we'll see where it goes. As for Batwoman, everything with AU!Beth is a little bit heartbreaking. I love how she stepped up to help Kate.

The Arrow series finale gets its own paragraph . So I am here to admit that my expectations for this finale were entirely wrong: Oliver stayed dead for real, and it looks like 2040 Felicity joined him, somehow? In the afterlife? Or maybe some other dimension? I don't know if DC has dimensions. Anyway, for an episode that was almost all denouement, except for the mini-plot relating to William's kidnapping (was that also supposed to resolve his kidnapping in 2040, or is that just left hanging along with J.J.'s memory restoration?), it held together pretty well and mostly answered questions rather than raising them (except for that bit with Digg at the end; are we supposed to know what that was all about?). It was nice to see so many other folks come back life, if bittersweet that Oliver didn't get to spend that restored time with them. As a real end to a superhero's story, it works pretty well, and provides a lot more closure than we usually get.

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.