Netflix Favorites and Flops and other Entertaining Things

I just finishing listening to one of my all-time favorite books, West with the Giraffes by Lynda Rutledge. My book club will be discussing it November forth on my recommendation and I'm anxious to see if others like the story as much as I do. It's probably my forth time listening to it and I enjoyed it every bit as much this time as the first, maybe more. Multiple exposures to favorite books or movies are like that. You pick up on nuances you missed the first time around and you are more apt to enjoy the build up to the the climax in the story, knowing what's a head. I won't bore you with a full-on review of the book. I did that back in 2021 here in an entire post devoted to the giraffes.

But before I leave that book behind I can't resist sharing one of my favorite passages. It speaks to me and about me every time I try to come up with something meaningful or at least entertaining to write: "In a long life, there is a singular moment when you know you’ve made more memories than any new ones you'll ever make. That’s when the moment your truest stories---the ones that made you the you that you became---are ever more in the front of your mind, as you begin to reach back for the you that you deemed best…[but] what I hadn’t noticed was that my mind was wearing out, too. Even the memories a body holds most dear become like scratchy old phonographs records played too long, fading in and out with little sound and even less fury.” 

Today when I sat down to write I knew I wanted to do a post about some of the Netflix fare I've been consuming. I binge watch about an hour and a half every night and I'm running out of stuff that holds my interest. One of the better binges I've done this month, though, was Your Honor. IMDb says this about it: "A judge confronts his convictions when his son is involved in a hit-and-run that embroils an organized-crime family." If ever there was a series that is a cautionary tale against lying this is it. One lie quickly mushroomed into bigger and bigger lies and bigger and bigger crimes until just about everyone involved was either dead or in jail by the closing episode. I like stuff with strong cliffhangers that keep you guessing from one episode to another and for that reason Your Honor held my interest. 

On the lighter side a ten episode binge called No One Wants This was a good 'palate cleanser' following the mayhem in the above mentioned Netflix series. The trailer labels it as: "An agnostic sex podcaster and a newly single rabbi fall in love; discovering if their relationship survive their wildly different lives and meddling families." The viewer is left at the end to be a little dissatisfied, not knowing if they will get their happy ending. Or maybe it just hinted at happy ending to leave the door open to another season?  Whatever the case, with its quirky characters and half hour episodes I binge-watched it in three evenings. Another series I tried for a total of nearly five full minutes before I knew I wasn't into gross, creepy, sick crime stuff was Dexter. If you watched it and liked it don't tell me. I don't want to judge you.

Another night I watched Netflix movie called No Pressure, filmed in Poland and it's about ten years behind in what American audiences are used to in terms of acting, etc. A reviewer called it "Old Wine in a New Bottle" and I agree. Fans of romantic comedies have seen this storyline of a big city girl who comes back to the country to save the family farm and ends up falling in love with a neighboring farmer/chef/wealthy man---whatever---a million times. I'm sorry, every time I try a foreign made movie I get either bored or hypercritical. 

Not that American film makers have left that tired plot behind. Hallmark Christmas movies have a giant portion of big city lonely people spending their holidays in small, mid-western towns where they find their forever person. I say 'person' rather than guy or gal because in 2022 Hallmark went woke and featured one movie with a gay couple finding-love-over-the-holidays. One movie out of their 170 Christmas movies that year.  The Holiday Sitter was the first ever Hallmark movie where a gay couple was the center of the action.  In 2023 Hallmark added two more LGBTQ movies to their Christmas/love lineup and I'm quite sure this turtle-slow trend is giving the Karen's of the world ulcers and contributing to their sky-is-falling dance against 'the gay issues' in our political arena. I'm so sick of Karens and Kens who want to ban books and movies. And if they insist of doing that why not start with banning the ones that give murderers tips on how to get away with their obsessions? Prioritize love over violence for crying out loud! If a teen or younger kid accidentally sees or reads about someone making love to someone they truly care about that isn't going to scar them for life like watching or reading about a psychopath dismembering a person they've been torturing for weeks in an underground cell. <Rant off.>

Yes, it's Halloween today but the Hallmark Christmas movies have been making their presence known for a few weeks already but I generally don't watch Christmas movies until we get our first snowfall. Then I'll pig out on their sweetness and goodwill toward mankind and the memories of finding love they churn up inside me. It's the only time of the year I consistently select the Hallmark Channel. I am nothing if not a creature of habit. ©

Until Next Wednesday...

Covid on Campus, Netflix's 'The 100' vs Hallmark

 

Well, it’s started. Covid is on our campus and is rearranging our lives. First it was two people then it spread to four and then it took the entire bridge club out of action and our Life Enrichment Director started canceling stuff hand over fist. Those with symptoms have to quarantine themselves in their apartments until they get a negative Covid test. Those who were exposed to someone with symptoms must get tested every day for five days and are asked to wear masks during those five days of waiting to see if they come down with Covid. Our dining room is like a ghost town because so many people are getting take-outs.

They had a vaccination clinic on campus yesterday for anyone who still hadn’t gotten the latest Covid and flu vaccines and it was well attended, I heard. I got my shots last month but it was interesting at the dinner table last night listening to a woman who took one look at the application for the clinic shots and decided not to get them because, “They want to know too much about us!” I saw the application in our daily email and it was the standard questions everyone everywhere will ask so they can bill your Medicare and/or private insurance company. And while several people including her husband tried to tell her that, she flatly refused believe it. So I mentally checked her off the list of people I’ll be sitting next to at book club, dinner, parties or lectures until flu and Covid season is over. I joked that I wish the powers that be should make us all wear our vaccination cards around our necks so we'd know who skips getting them, and someone else took that idea to higher level and added that they could color code them like the state does with are car license tabs.

I also checked off the list sitting near known Trump supporters. As our most vocal Trumpette said this week, “Covid is just a bad cold with a new name!” I beg your pardon, Dumbass, colds didn’t killed millions of people worldwide at the beginning of the pandemic. Oh, the things I would like to say and don’t. She tells everyone she’s never had Covid, been sick with a bad cold but go over it. “It was nothing.” I did have the guts to call her a Spreader, though, after she said she'd never been tested for Covid. “If you’ve never been tested then you don’t know if you had it or not. That makes you a Spreader.” I learned those lines from my niece and I was proud I had the guts to use it. 

This year, people have been reporting how easy Covid was to catch but that their symptoms are cold-like. That’s no excuse for not getting the vaccines. It’s because of the vaccines that Covid variations are getting weaker and/or our immune systems are getting stronger. One couple here, though, was an exception. They’ve been sick and off the grid for five whole weeks. They’d been tested many times over that time frame for Covid and various other viruses but nothing has shown up. They described their symptoms as “Sleeping Beauty Meets Apathy.” All they wanted to do is sleep, and had no energy or desire to fight the fog in their heads. Listening to them at dinner I started worrying about myself because lately I’ve been falling asleep every time I sit in my La-Z-Boy. When I voiced this out loud someone laughed and told me that’s just old age catching up with me.

We’re not under a mask requirement to be in public areas. Yet. But before the winter is over I’ll bet we will see its return. Visitors aren’t being logged in for contact tracing either which I’m happy about not having to do every time I visit my brother. But I will gladly comply if it means the Activities Calendar doesn’t keep getting events crossed off. This morning the monthly birthday party bit the dust and I always enjoy the musical entertainment at those. Even Mahjong got canceled because the woman who taught us all how to play also plays bridge and is still in the "spreader phase" of Covid.

Between Covid taking away my fun stuff, my frustrations with Google and Bloggers, the clown show going on in our House of Representatives, two terrible wars in the world and now another mass shooting spree, I finally resorted to doing what I usually do in situations when I feel helpless. I found myself a post-apocalyptic Netflix series to watch. I know, it doesn’t make sense that watching or reading about how people survive (or not) in a post-apocalyptic world somehow helps me to put things in prospective. But it does. My problems get smaller by comparison and they remind me that it’s the strong that survives, the ones who don’t give up. I got this way because both my parents were good at pointing out, "It could be worse" when I did stuff like skin a knee. "you've still go a leg."

In the past week and a half I’ve binge-watched the first three seasons of The 100. It's about a group of 100 teenagers from a detention center who were born, raised and lived on The Ark, a space station built after a nuclear disaster that fried our planet. The Ark is dying and the teens were sent down to see if earth is inhabitable. Of course, it is and they soon find out there are pockets of societies who are descendants of people who never left earth. Here in real time there are so many bat-crazy things going on but at least I can go to bed at night and not have to worry about people living in a domed city who’d hunt me down, drain my blood then give me to the Cave Reapers to finish me off. You can't get that kind of reassurance watching those Christmas Romance movies on Hallmark. 

Yes, it's that time of year again and one day like magic a switch will get flipped in my head---soon I predict---and I'll be trading the post-apocalyptic junk in for the promise of everlasting love. Three of Hallmark movies doesn't make a binge but that's my score as of right now and already I see a pattern emerging of overworked mom's learning how to knit. That's product placement at work but no one does product placement better than Hallmark. Last night's movie revealed a brother and sister separated by adoption 50 years ago had both written, never send but kept Christmas cards they wrote every year to the other one. That script was a shoe-in to sell to Hallmark. Don't you just love how cleaver some people can be? Hallmark wants a Christmas card in every movie, I've give them 100!

Until Next Wednesday. ©