What did I do lately? Well, a whole lot of Christmas!
That’s right, it’s been the most wonderful time of the year, with the kids jingle belling and everyone telling you be of good cheer!
Well, not exactly, but it was pretty nice. It’s been a busy time, but busy with lots of good things. Like a nice Christmas Eve service at church…
…and some great meals, including a delicious lunch on Christmas Eve at Tony Roma’s (a restaurant I’m not familiar with but which is apparently popular with Americans, or at least Americans living in Perth).
And at our missions community with had a big Italian-themed Christmas lunch on the big day itself.
Christmas also involved decorations, stockings, and presents…
….and of course the beach, because we’re in Australia and it was like a million degrees over the last couple of days.
I think I’ll share more about presents tomorrow, or sometime soon.
We also beat the heat today by heading out to the movies–always a safe place to access some solid air conditioning while also being entertained for a couple of hours? Our choice of entertainment?
Dune
Dune is still a relatively recent movie here in the land of Oz. It was quite good but also a little tedious and slow moving. I guess it’s nothing to complain about, and probably if I hadn’t been so tired in general I wouldn’t have minded (and I wouldn’t have kept nodding of during the film!) The visuals are certainly sprawling and epic and the acting all solid. I joke that this movie is perfectly targeted at people like my teen-aged daughter, with its cast including Timothée Chalamet, Zendaya and Jason Momoa. Of course it’s also got Rebecca Ferguson, which kind of makes it perfectly targeted for me.
Anyway, it’s a good film even though it only tells half the story (at least, half the initial story). It’s certainly a long way more satisfying than the David Lynch oddity from the 1980’s.
Upload
Also around and in between Christmas things I managed to binge my way through the whole first season of Upload, a comedy by Greg Daniels (the creator of The Office). The gist of the show is that it’s a near-future semi-dystopia in which the near-dead can be uploaded into a virtual reality heaven where they can basically live forever, with their every need fulfilled by the computer system. Or at least to the degree that they can afford the subscription fees and the in-app purchases. Robbie Amell (who played Ronnie Raymond for a little while on The Flash) plays Nathan Brown, a computer engineer who is uploaded to an expensive afterlife by his wealthy but shallow girlfriend, to whom he becomes completely dependent on for his entire existence. Nathan’s dissatisfaction with his girlfriend and his life in general prior to his death are explored, as well as his growing relationship with the customer service representative assigned to help him adjust to his new existence.
It’s an interesting show with an engaging mix of comedy and mystery (it turns out that Nathan’s death was more than just an accident). There are some extremely adult situations that I’ve skipped through on more than one occasion.
Lost in Space
Over this last couple of weeks we finished the third season of this show, which also means we’ve completed the whole series. I really enjoyed this show. The storytelling wasn’t always perfect but I liked the characters so much that it didn’t really matter. In this last season it was interesting watching them actually get to Alpha Centuari (the first time I’ve seen that in any iteration of Lost in Space, and also see them bring Parker Posey’s Dr. Smith to a place of redemption at the end, after teasing us with this for three seasons. I will definitely miss the show now that it’s over.
Hawkeye
We also finished Hawkeye the other night, bringing the MCU’s fourth live action Disney + to a close. As I predicted, this has wound up being my favorite of the lot. Again, it was often far from perfect, but it was the most consistently enjoyable through the entirety of its run.
Jeremy Renner and Hailee Steinfeld are fun to watch and work well together. The twist reveals of Yelena (from Black Widow) and the Kingpin (from the Daredevil TV series on Netflix) were cool but ultimately both characters ended up being distractions. Consequently, the last episode of Hawkeye was the weakest of the lot, but the drop in quality was much less drastic than with Loki or WandaVision (Falcon & Winter Soldier didn’t really have the drop–it was just pretty bad all the way through). So, in spite of some evident weaknesses and a lot of silliness, I liked Hawkeye quite a bit.
No song of the week this week because I want to get this post going. My goal once Daily Doctor Who ended back in November was to maintain a daily posting rate–unfortunately I somehow missed a day about a week or two ago, so now I’m not too stressed about it, but I still want to get things out there even in the midst of the busyness.
I will share this photo of my steps two weeks ago–I ended the week with a killer 22,000 steps in one day, one of my highest ever.
I was crazy tired at the end of it. But now this new week is a week off from work so it’ll be interesting if I can keep up my normal pace.
And if the suspense is killing you about that, you’ll have to wait til next week to find out!
Blue Towel Productions 