Board 8 > Ranking the TV shows and movies I watched in the year of lockdown

(+) Yeah! (+)

Just doing what B8 does best. I tried compiling from my watch history across streaming services, but only Netflix is particularly reliable, and I also watched on other people's accounts. But anyway, here we go. About 40 shows and 32 movies.

Series 40. Giri/Haji (Netflix 8-episode miniseries, 2019)

Man, this had so much potential. Kenzo is a Japanese cop sent to London to retrieve his previously-thought-dead yakuza brother Yuto, who's murdered a fellow yakuza and triggered a gang war in Japan. Its gunfights are ridiculously stylized.

The problem with this show begins with its melodrama. Characters acting like it's the END OF THE WORLD can heighten viewer emotion, but this show cranks it up huge. Making it worse, though, is the number of shitty subplots we're forced to entertain. Other than the gang war and Kenzo, we're pelted with Kenzo's daughter and a random half-British, half-Japanese sex worker in London. Shockingly, Kenzo's daughter's main role is to get into trouble and get kidnapped. We're also force-fed an abominable romance between Kenzo and a British cop. They have zero chemistry and hey, why not put more pressure on Kenzo's wife, who at least is doing good things over in Japan.

I will say that the show is very ambitious, and there are some really entertaining gunfight scenes. It can be shockingly violent at times - lots of lovingly filmed bullets to the brain at unexpected times. But we're talking about a show where every character is either awful or tedious, and it literally culminates in a minutes-long, worldless interpretive dance sequence.
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Movie 32. Red Dragon (2002)

I love Silence of the Lambs. Its prequel, starring the same Anthony Hopkins but with Edward Norton, is... bad. Lecter himself is still reasonably enjoyable, but the plot is incredibly dull, and knowing we're in a prequel also takes some of the edge off. The villain is almost unwatchable.

It doesn't particularly help that during this same quarantine (list spoilers!) I watched Hannibal the TV series. The final few episodes tell the Red Dragon story. That story is dull enough there, but watching an inferior version in film form felt like a particularly bad waste of time.
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Red Dragon is alright, but I would take the '86 Manhunter over it in a heartbeat because that film is bizarre. Red Dragon is just an excuse to make another Lecter film with Norton who was pretty much at the peak of his powers, only a few years removed from Primal Fear, American History X, and Fight Club.

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Series 39. Dragon's Dogma (Netflix 7-episode miniseries, 2020)

In contrast to Giri/Haji, Dragon's Dogma never really promised me anything great. It's apparently based off a video game, which is obviously not very inspiring. (I could only stomach one episode of Castlevania.) Like so many other works, it's focused on being DARK AND GRITTY as it follows Ethan, a dude whose village gets slain by a dragon, and this not-human-but-looks-like-a-human woman who promises to be his protector/servant. He is out for REVENGE. The tone of things and the flat characters and flat plot make the show rather uninteresting overall.

There are some cool parts about this series, though. The naming of each episode is a deadly sin, and I kind of love symmetry that way. The peeks into the world remind me a lot of Kino's Journey - a bunch of vignettes that show how human nature is kind of fucked up, but that there's something in there worth fighting for. And hey, when he confronts the dragon, there is a neat twist to it, so that's cool as well.
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Movie 31. Avatar (2009)

I think most people have heard of or seen this one - set on a distant planet, humans clash with the native humanoid creatures as they try to mine its natural resources. A disabled human soldier uses the avatar technology to take control of a genetically engineered Navi body, then becomes sympathetic to the Navi cause.

Finally saw this movie this year on Disney Plus. It's very visually cool and I really liked Signourney Weaver, but it was just a hard watch when the whole time I was disgusted with the white savior storyline. Lots of movies tend to have some sort of white supremacy in them, but this one feels worse because it seemingly tells us that exploiting other cultures is a bad thing while showing us how easy and cool it is to infiltrate another tribe, become better than them at everything they do, and bag their hottest chick. Gross.
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Series 38. The Undoing (HBO MAX 8-episode miniseries, 2020)

The Undoing is a Nicole Kidman vanity project. She plays a New York socialite whose husband (Hugh Grant), a respected surgeon, is accused of murdering the mother of one of her kid's classmates. The series plays out as a combination of courtroom drama and whodunnit.

This series is kind of a mess. It's ultra-grim/ethereal in tone and styles itself as a thriller. It has lots of shots of characters' hands as they react and lots of loving closeups on the protagonist's eyes as she gets more scared. But (and since it's a mystery, I'll spoiler-tag some of this) it randomly tosses in a ton of red herrings that really don't make sense. There's hints that Nicole Kidman is an unreliable narrator, for example, when the cops hit her with a gotcha that we didn't even notice as an audience. But very quickly they just write that off. The moment was meant to make us question things, but it doesn't really go anywhere. (Similar pointless suspicions are stirred for a rather pointlessly suspicious best friend and scenes featuring Nicole Kidman's dad. These are never actually addressed either.)

The smoking gun/pivotal moments are also rather botched. The next spoiler addresses the ending itself - it's exciting when they discover the murderer is Grant himself, and that flashback is pretty visceral... but it's incredibly unsatisfying how they "prove" it. First, a weapon appears on the murderer's own property, a move that's so dumb even the lawyer woman yells at him for it. Secondly, the way the protagonist "gets" him in court is super-annoying - she really shouldn't have been allowed to testify at all, since the case was already won for the defense. And the anecdote she shared... I mean, it was pretty chilling hearing that story from her mother-in-law, but it's literally a repeated story of something she never even saw herself. The final scene on a bridge also doesn't feel like closure so much as just "OK, he's cornered, so there you go.

This is a show that could be remembered a lot better by sticking the ending, especially since it's a miniseries. But that clumsiness really makes the whole thing feel less satisfying.

The central unraveling is a worthy tale. Who is your partner? Can you really know them? For that, and some of the slow-burn thrills it delivers, this show isn't a total waste of time. But a miniseries certainly deserves a strong ending, especially a mystery, and this one utterly botches the final stretch.
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Movie 30. Holidate (2020)

This is a Netflix original Christmas movie. It hits a bunch of romcom cliches, starting with the preposterous premise: that you "need" a guy who will just be your date, no questions asked, for some occasions. The chemistry here is poor and the snappy dialogue is basically just lampshading the tropes that get hit without actually using those tropes to any particularly good effect. I don't really remember this one well enough to go much more into detail, but it's certainly a forgettable piece of work.
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gonna continue this because why not

Series 37. Dating Around (Season 2, 2020, 6ish episodes)

Dating Around is a pretty interesting concept. You follow a person as they go on three separate dates at the same restaurant. There are lots of cameras around each date, and you just watch them happen. The clever editing splices each date so you can't actually tell which ones happened in which order. Instead you get the cuts as the same person, in the same seat on different nights, greets different people entering. It's kind of fun to watch how different or similar those greetings can be - sometimes a hug, sometimes an awkward comment about appearance, etc. At the end of the episode, they choose one person to see again.

Season 1 took place in, surprise, New York. Season 2 decides to move to New Orleans, and it's noticeably worse as a result. The anonymity and dating pool just feel a lot smaller there. The participants will talk about New Orleans an uncomfortable amount, and in one episode, a participant is like the ex-professor or something of the other participant. In another, two gay men were actually exes. The two Asian people who got paired together seemed to find the fact they were both Asian to be extremely surprising. The people from New York talked about New York. Overall, it felt less like anonymity and more like this weird searching of "how do I know you."

I don't remember most of the dates in particular this season, though I do remember being rather dissatisfied with many of their choices. The best part of the season was probably the one girl in episode 1 who didn't give a fuck about going real hard eating messy.
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Movie 29. Misery (1990)

I think a lot of people might like this more than I did, but this just made me deeply uncomfortable. I didn't even know it was based off a Stephen King novel until afterward, but I could kind of tell - the protagonist (and older James Caan) is a writer confined to bed by rabid fangirl Annie, played by Kathy Bates.

It's possible that these psychological thrillers are just not really my thing. It's kind of obvious that the protagonist can't escape until the end. I enjoy a bit of predictability, but it's no fun for me to watch the only likable character - the sheriff - get killed in frustrating fashion, or to watch the protagonist fail to escape repeatedly, or to watch the torture porn as Annie breaks Caan's legs.

I will say that the movie was extremely tense, so there's that.
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Bumpo

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thanks poka

Series 36. She-Ra and the Princesses of Power (Season 1, 2018, 13 episodes)

She-Ra is one of those shows we picked up and watched fairly quickly but never got sucked into. It's an animated fantasy/sci-fi show that blends some classic fantasy magic powers and somewhat futuristic weaponry. The protagonist, a teenage girl in a military academy, winds up inheriting the power of She-Ra, a dormant warrior demigod, and realizes that perhaps the nation that keeps trying to colonize the people of the forest is bad.

I think the principles of She-Ra are pretty great. There's flame-forged friendship, battle, superpowers, betrayals, anti-war sentiment, and politicking. The technologies that they use are pretty creative - one of the Princesses of Power designs new ones all the time and winds up becoming the driving force of the bad guys' armies. But it is also kind of clearly a show made for seven-year-old girls, and practically everything about the execution is off-putting or overly simplified for my taste.

For example - and I suppose this qualifies as a spoiler, though the plot is so barebones I'm not sure it'll matter too much - there's a very cool, near-climactic sequence where Adora and the rest of the Princesses all storm the military fortress. They wind up abandoning Entrapta there as they flee. This winds up with Entrapta flipping over to the bad guys. This has all the makings of a cool character arc as you consider sacrifices, the costs of war, the feelings of betrayal. But it's all executed in a painfully simplistic manner, and one that doesn't even make a lot of sense. (It's been a while, but it seems like the princess gang thinks Entrapta is dead - but she's insanely competent up til this point, so it's a bizarre assumption.)

Or take Shadow Weaver. She's a pretty classic archetype of an abusive parental figure with something to hide. But her lines, appearance, and voice are so hammy that it's cringeworthy more than dramatic any time she's on screen.

Or even the theme song. I love a good theme song, and often a theme song that I watch many times can grow on me. Over the course of thirteen episodes... that did not happen here.

I only got one season into a five-season show, and it did show a lot of storyline promise. I actually wasn't a huge fan of the vast majority of S1 of Avatar, either, and it became perhaps my favorite western cartoon of all time. But it's a little hard to subject myself (and a fairly unwilling watching partner) to more for now. Maybe someday we can revisit.
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Bumpo

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Series 35. The Mindy Project (Seasons 4-6, 50 episodes, 2015-2017)

I watched the first three seasons of Mindy Kaling's show shortly after they aired. It's a silly take on romantic comedy tropes and features a bunch of guest stars you'll recognize if you watched a lot of mid-00s and early '10s network TV comedies. Mindy Kaling plays Mindy Lahiri, an OBGYN who loves romance and eating. It was canceled on FOX after three seasons, but Hulu resuscitated it. I got Hulu during the pandemic and eventually got around to wrapping up the series, five years later.

It wasn't that terrible. I did laugh several times per episode. But I feel like the increasing politicization of the world makes this a bit cringier. Mindy is a woman of color, but every love interest of a straight female character (and there are a lot of love interests) is a white man. The show is also remarkably eager to introduce and have us sympathize with a new character, a lecherous, older southern white dude who says tons of casually racist things. He's portrayed as a love interest a few times. The show's primary love interest from the earlier seasons, a portrait of toxic masculinity, also leaves the show. Now they were already too serious for a "romcom" format to work for three seasons, so it's kind of understandable - but the void isn't particularly well filled. (When that character does make his occasional returns, it definitely amps up the chemistry of the show again, but also is jarring in how he's also frequently casually racist.)

The Mindy Project has a network-sitcom-staple wacky supporting cast, but the remnants here are worse than in many others. Morgan is the default pathologically stupid and loyal henchman nurse, but he feels way too annoying and unrealistic and creepy most of the time. Tamra, the most prominent other female character, is a nurse who winds up being Morgan's love interest. This is of course absolutely preposterous. The show also goes out of its way to let us know that Mindy, despite being rotund, is incredibly attractive to men. That isn't so bad on its own, but combined with her choice of love interests and her declaring (but never showing) how good of a mother she is, it feels like a sad sort of power fantasy. And I guess it's not my type of fantasy.

After a while, the ridiculousness of the things our racist friend Jody says and the repeated effeminate mumblings of British lead doctor Jeremy do lead to laughs. But the big picture, and especially the way the show takes the romantic plots in the end, doesn't really land for the conclusion of The Mindy Project.
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Movie 28. Nocturnal Animals (2016)

What a bizarre movie. Amy Adams plays an icy, successful career woman married to Armie Hammer. They're an attractive pair with nothing wrong with them, but she seems unsatisfied in her relationship. Then, her ex sends her a novel, and we start mostly following the novel and a few flashbacks to the protagonist's relationship with her ex.

The novel begins with the lead character being held at gunpoint as his wife and daughter are kidnapped and eventually raped and murdered off screen. It then turns into a slog of a trek as, along with a cop, the protagonist extracts a bloody revenge. In Amy Adams's mind, her the lead of the novel is portrayed by her ex, Jake Gyllenhaal.

There isn't much of a plot to the movie. It's a series of unsettling scenes and closeups of Amy Adams's eyes as she reads the book. The movie also begins with a series of naked women dancing. It's dark and bizarre and uncomfortable and really just not my thing as thrillers go, though it does have a way of lingering in my mind afterward, which may be a sign of its success.
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Series 34. Property Brothers (random episodes, around 10+ or so? 2011-present)

This is the only HGTV show I've put here, though I guess I also came across some random episodes of Love It Or List It, Chip and Joanna, and others.

Property Brothers is probably a mid-range, maybe slightly above-average HGTV show. The format is that the Property Brothers, Jonathan and Drew, help a couple to tour and buy a home, but they can't afford to buy the exact home they want. They wind up buying something a little below their price range and then allocating tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars to renovating it, a responsibility that the Property Brothers take on. The Property Brothers are tall, good-looking twins who seem relatively affable.

I actually really like the principle of Property Brothers and don't hate real estate porn TV as a rule. The brothers' clientele tend to shop a little more expensive than many other shows' - in general budgets are in the 800K to 1MM range, which can be pretty dispiriting as a prospective homebuyer myself. There are house-shopping and fixer-upper shows, but PB manages to combine the two in a pretty unique way, since they are entirely serving clients, and they usually throw in a few extra details to round out the house.

Everything you expect is here - slightly cheesy editing, reaction shots, unrealistic expectations, "water damage," chemistry issues, the like. Depending on the amount of dramatic roadblocks hit, the show may pad out episodes with banter and scenes where they just play a sport or whatever. Usually PB is pretty positive in tone, despite issues, which is nice.

The show's most awkward part is probably that the PB themselves just aren't that likable - there's something just a little off-putting about how much eye contact they're always making. And maybe it's the enforced nature of the series where the leads need to banter - the episode always ends with the two brothers taking a random potshot at each other, and it makes it just feel really bizarre.
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She-Ra:

I watched a bunch of season 1 of this because I'd heard great things, including from people here. But yeah, all of your comments are all spot on. It just keeps everything too basic. Everyone always mentions Avatar but I think other shows like Young Justice and, as memey as it is, My Little Pony have showed us that these shows can take its characters and stories a bit more seriously despite being "for kids."

If I actually had kids this show would be fine enough to watch with them and they might love it, so it's a good recommendation for parents, but certainly not good enough to watch just as a fan of animated shows.

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I think most western animation includes that base level of kid-friendly cringe, I know The Last Airbender certainly does. I loved She-Ra and I think it's one of the greats especially later.

yeah, as i pointed out, avatar's first season was pretty shaky for me as well. i think the kiddie-cringe levels drop off majorly starting in season 2 though; i started laughing way harder at its humor and the plot got far more interesting.

i'm more skeptical of she-ra's ability to become great later, possibly because they covered so much in the first season, kind of already covering the whole world. avatar was really cool because they unfurled it at a deliberate pace, while she-ra felt like it played a lot of its hand early on. the fiancee isn't interested in continuing, so if i do it'll be at an absolute crawl and not during our dinner shows or weekend binges, where i definitely watch most of my stuff. and it'll be competing with a lot.
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Well, there's definitely more places in the world, at least.

I dont get watching entire series you dont enjoy. If I dont like the first episode of something I just drop it.

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But sometimes the first episode of a show is really bad compared to the rest of it.

returning to this tomorrow!

and yeah, i've liked tons of shows more after the first episode. but those are usually shows thay have good reputations, or ones that are easy to watch, or in short series so completing them is easy
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Movie 27. Poltergeist (1982)

So this is apparently one of the more OG horror movies. We watched it in October along with a bunch of other scary stuff. And... well, I'm just not that big a fan of horror stuff.

For the most part, I think the age was probably a good thing. Characters weren't overly self-aware and there wasn't a ton of Marvel-ized dialogue, which there didn't need to be. I guess this whole "we don't believe you" trope also didn't really appear here - it was pretty straight up us versus the house. The most jarringly dated part was construction workers catcalling the fifteen-year-old daughter on her way to school and her welcoming it. Gross.

The movie definitely leans toward tedium for a lot of it. The house attacking its residents was pretty interesting at first, but the nonsensical resolution as they get some medium and then go "through to the other side" becomes a rather dull mess. And while at the end the clown attack after the messy big resolution is scary, at that point the movie's already lost my interest multiple times with its length.
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forgot about this, quick bump
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If I was doing the same, I'd probably have Braindead as my number 1 show.

West Wing is right with it at 2 though.

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Series 33. The Flight Attendant (HBO MAX 8-episode miniseries, 2020)

I don't buy the hype in a lot of these "event shows" - my favorite series tend to have long seasons, plot arcs that take 20+ episodes to unroll, characters that you follow for years. But I'm willing to give event shows a shot, simply because - as we all know - they're low-commitment. And in mid-late 2020, with TV running out, there was a lot of hype around HBO Max's show.

The Flight Attendant follows Kaley Cuoco's titular flight attendant who becomes mixed up in a complex murder during a one-night stand. It then tackles her struggles with alcoholism, her relationship with her family, asks of us why we think she hates herself so much.

There's some fun stuff to this. It's occasionally humorous and I do kinda like the protagonist's lawyer friend. But overall, it really feels like material that I'm rather tired of - substance abuse problem storylines have always bored me; using substance abuse/past trauma to explain a character's bad decisions is boring; I don't really see there being a lot of redemption for our heroine. In the end she does make strides toward being a better person, but it's really not the type of story that interests me much without the humor.

I guess I shouldn't begrudge the feminist power fantasy that much since I think I probably like some male power fantasy shows, but this just didn't really capture my attention. Maybe that's simply because it didn't give itself long enough to endear itself to me, but more likely it's because I found the heroine's motivations uninspiring and her self-destructive behavior dull.
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Movie 26. The Little Things (2021)

We watched this on HBO Max - Denzel Washington is an old cop returning to work a case that reminds him of a string of unsolved cases from way back when, helping Rami Malek along the way.

This movie kind of hits all sorts of boring notes to me. It's relentlessly grim in tone, lionizes the cop experience as struggling to do the right thing, features little actual action (as opposed to the "suspense moments"), ends relatively unsolved. Movies like this can really redeem themselves with something really great in their ending, but this was definitely not up my alley.

It ranks slightly above Nocturnal Animals, the most similar movie on my list, and that's because it had slightly fewer things that bothered me - Jared Leto being unhinged is somewhat more bearable than the violence against innocents in Nocturnal Animals. So it was less uncomfortable to watch, but it says even less, so maybe it should rank lower, in hindsight.
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Series 32. The Haunting of Bly Manor (8-episode miniseries, 2020)
Series 31. The Haunting of Hill House (8-episode miniseries, 2018)

So starting here, there's genuinely a lot of stuff I did like about these shows, even if they're not entirely up my alley.

This is an anthology-style series, so like True Detective or whatever, they would make sense to be ranked separately. That said, they wound up ranking right next to each other because they did so many things similarly. Notably, both stories are about haunted houses, but more specifically look at the trauma that haunted-house survivors face.

As I mentioned in the Poltergeist writeup, I'm not that big into horror movies and horror tropes. These Haunting shows are like love letters to the genre. I'm also not into overly slow and artsy stuff, but the Haunting shows clearly have prestige-TV ambitions (there's like a ten-minute shot full of characters walking in and out of a room in one of the middle episodes - a neat camera trick/difficult stunt, but not a particularly interesting scene).

Hill House, the first season, sticks out way more in my memory. Decades after surviving a haunted house, five siblings find themselves drawn to it once again. There are unresolved mysteries about the past and there's lots of ill will between how the characters have ended up. Drug addiction, media exploitation, and fixation with dead people feature a lot, and the arguments can be pretty unfun to watch.

And yet there's something quite powerful about how it all comes together. The horror they experienced as children is what split up the family, so when they find themselves drawn back together, they wind up confronting it together. The most interesting hook about the story (and a surefire gimmick to please me) is the point-of-view structure. Like in LOST, each of the first five episodes centers on one of the siblings' entire story. Watching them in this order reveals truths about interactions that we've previously only seen from another sibling's POV. The final of these POV episodes feels like a true climax, resolving a major mystery and giving the most powerful emotional torque.

Season 2 isn't as memorable in my mind, but while S1's story sticks out to me a lot, both share the same melancholy yet somewhat hopeful tone. Both also lean into some of the worse tropes that they could have chosen, but overall, while I may be somewhat unhappy that I wasted entire days to watch these in a row, I'm glad I watched both of these. Other than the fact that my fiancee now refuses to sleep without a night light.
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Movie 25. The Notebook (2004)

The Notebook has been a meme for how tear-inducing it is for a while. I can get really emotional with art - most recently, Hunter x Hunter, Minari, and The Corrections had moments that wrecked me - but I was also pretty aware that The Notebook was also memetically cheesy. I wasn't sure which sensibility would strike me more.

Turns out, it's... neither? I was mostly just disgusted. Ryan Gosling (an actor I've never liked) takes the classic, despicable "dogged nice guy" approach. He winds up "winning" and being a good husband which I guess is supposed to justify it, but the path to getting there is pretty awful - it turns out that this is a movie that glorifies cheating, which I absolutely despise.

As for the parts of the movie that are supposed to be legitimately tear-jerking, I think if the love story were any more likable, convincing, or less outright despicable, I think it could have worked out. The framing device was a little cheesy but felt real and painful, though with its brighter moments. But the backstory narrative absolutely killed any thrust there for me.
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Series 30. Bling Empire (Season 1, 2020, 8 episodes)

Good god, this series is trashy. This was billed to me as Crazy Rich Asians, but a reality TV series. It's true that the Asian cast spends lavishly, but they're mostly in California. The series leans heavily into "reality TV personalities," featuring the flamboyant guy who mentions he's going to try dating guys to close out the series, the dumb-but-nice dude who takes his shirt off a lot, the ex-pop idol adjusting to housewife life but who's extremely convinced that her mother is reincarnating in her infant son, the "I didn't come here to make friends" 40-something socialite who married rich, and the girl who can't

Some of the manufactured drama feels kind of entertaining, even if it's fake. Like, there's a scene in the first episode or something where one woman, hosting a major party, slights another by wearing a necklace that the first woman owns, or something. So then she wears it as revenge at dinner, except then the other woman seats the first woman at the un-fun table or something.

But then there's other drama which legit feels like shit, real or not. A younger woman goes into an older woman's house during a pool party and then laughingly goes through her stuff and finds a penis pump. She then brings it in front of everyone and makes fun of her hostess and never apologizes for her actions. It's the type of drama that actually gets me feeling kind of upset inside, and almost everyone takes her side, and the one character who stands up for the party's host winds up forgiving her later, despite no contrition shown. Was the entire drama just manufactured, or was it real? If it were real, then how can I enjoy watching these characters? And if it were manufactured, then why not give it a real ending?

Another gross subplot involves another of the younger women's romantic life. Apparently she has a tumultuous on/off relationship with her boyfriend, a loser actor. The leading guy of the series (you can tell he's the leading character because he's the best-looking, was raised by white parents, is portrayed as being kind of stupid, and doesn't come from that much money) has a crush on her and openly tells her to break up with that guy. It's super-cringe-y. Anyway, the show follows this girl breaking up with her boyfriend "for real," except then we see her hanging out with him again and then eventually getting back with him to close out the series. Could that be real? I mean, maybe - everyone watching can certainly see how much of a creep that guy is - but god, it lowers your faith in humanity.

Anyway, yeah, lots of hate-watching here, but it mostly kept us entertained for a few weeknight dinners. so I guess that's that.
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up for now
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more soon
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Movie 24. Mulan (2020)

I wanted to like this movie, but man, it kinda sucked in almost every aspect. I'm not going to bother trying to rate this movie "in isolation," because it was made by Disney, which is in the process of remaking all of their animated canon in live action. This one suffers badly from the changes it made. It literally turned Mulan from a girl who was notable for her courage and wits to someone who had literal magic powers. The Chinese concept of chi is definitely cool and I have a fair amount of love for wuxia action, but when only the main character has it and that's the reason she's special, it fucking blows.

The red witch is also a really bad addition. I can give the movie some credit for trying to be more feminist, showing how women have been both feared and abused universally throughout time. But she's poorly acted and written and the continued use of magic takes away from a really cool existing story. Mulan herself also suffers from the lack of ridiculous cartoon sidekicks; Eddie Murphy's animated dragon was ridiculous but provided a better way to do internal monologue and express self-doubt. This actress wasn't terrible, but the inner conflict and worries of Mulan were better externalized to her supernatural companion.

Finally, the movie dropped the general's son and all the music (except as leitmotifs, the only parts of the movie that really caught my attention), then stretched the length of the film out by an extra unneeded half hour. Sad times.
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Series 29. Wayward Pines (Seasons 1-2, 20 episodes, 2015-2016)

Man, this series had so many cool ideas. In a classic high-concept story setup, an FBI agent (or some sort of law enforcement dude) goes to investigate a missing partner and finds himself in a car accident. When he wakes up, he's in a claustrophobic small town with no cell phone signal, no internet, no TV - only a bunch of citizens who seem extremely eager to keep him in Wayward Pines with him as sheriff. There's a ton of eeriness as we try to figure out why exactly this town and its residents are so weird.

The first several episodes follow this thread (as well as his wife/kid/boss on the outside) as we try to unravel what's going on. The acting and writing are bad and the characters are poorly drawn, but the mystery at the core is undoubtedly intriguing. And hey, there is at least one archetype that they do have who functions pretty well: the creepy nurse who insists on giving injections and leers at the protagonist, telling him to make sure he continues to do his job. And when the mystery of the show is finally revealed during the first season, it's suitably eerie and chilling.

Unfortunately, from there, the storyline just doesn't appear to have that many legs. If the entirety of humanity is constrained now to this small town (and whoever they choose to wake up), your cast is incredibly limited, and everyone you introduce has to have come from the past. The Abbies wind up being rather dull enemies as well. Season 2 largely kills off Season 1's unmemorable cast and tries to make us sympathize with the (new) young dictator Jason and ultimately pulls the "plot twist" that he's having sex with his mom. It does not work great.

I think there was the possibility of making Wayward Pines work even after the reveal, given better writing. But the show was always way more about the concept than the characters, and what it needed to sustain itself once the big secret was revealed was characters we cared about. The show turns incredibly grim and largely features waste-of-space characters even as it tries to expand its ideas. An unfortunate execution on a very cool premise.
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