General Blather

I first noticed this on Disney+, but then have seen it listed on just about every streaming service we use.

In this delightful romantic comedy, Ryan Reynolds plays the title character, Guy. Guy doesn't know it, but we very quickly find out (and it's in the trailer) that he's a non-player character (NPC) in a free-world video game. He immediately dialogues about the spectacular life the "sunglasses people" get to lead, compared with the happy but repetitive lives he and his friends and peers lead. The "sunglasses people" are the real world players, of course, but we don't get to know that really just yet, although it's clear, again from the trailer.

Just as we hear about some of the aspirations Guy has, he walks by the girl of his dream. Of course, she's one of the "sunglasses people," but he's undeterred and attempts to reach out to her by acquiring some sunglasses from another player. He accidentally kills this player, bringing him to the attention of the real world administrators of the game. While they work out what to do, Guy starts to figure out that the world he's in isn't all it seems, and the adventure begins.

The movie goes pretty much how you might expect it.

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Netflix released a piece of political satire, wherein the world is about to be destroyed by an extinction-level asteroid, but society and politicians aren't rightly concerned.

It's a star-studded film. Leonardo DiCaprio plays Dr Minsky, a tenured astronomy professor at the Michigan State University. Jennifer Lawrence plays his (often indicated) doctoral candidate student, Kate Dibiasky. Meryl Streep plays the President of the United States.

Dibiasky is working with Minsky to study supernovas in the galaxy when she notices a strange object moving in the sky. Investigation follows, and a previously undiscovered comet is discovered, and named after the discoverer, Dibiasky. Comet Dibiasky is found to be on a collision course with Earth, in just about six months. This is peer reviewed and confirmed, and the findings brought to the attention of NASA and the US Government.

That's when it starts to get hilarious, and peeks under the bonnet at all of the things going wrong right now.

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Because I'd watched Squid Game and Alice in Borderland, and maybe just because of its marketing or popularity, Netflix insisted on pushing Hellbound on me. So I caved and watched it. It's six hour-ish episodes, which I got part of one or two of, every night or so over the last week.

It's a Korean mini-series wherein mystical creatures will appear to warn people that they've been chosen to be culled, and that they're going to hell. They're given a time and day, on which these monsters from hell appear to take them away. The monsters are big ashen Hulk-like creatures, that seem to have a singular focus on their intended subject. They brutally attack, and eventually burn the victim to a charred, partial skeleton, before jumping into a portal back to wherever.

Most of that is in the trailer or can be gleaned from the series intro on Netflix.

The story follows some police as they try to investigate this bizarre series of murders, with these far-fetched stories from witnesses, and the otherwise inexplicable crime scenes. Then one of the people who have been given their deadline, called decrees, agrees to have their event, called a demonstration, in public and on television. The first few episodes bounce around these stories, interwoven with other decrees and demonstrations, building up the mystery and intrigue.

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Yesterday Apple TV+ released a new Tom Hanks movie, Finch. After the kids went to bed, I dove into this post-apocalyptic introspection movie.

Tom Hanks plays the title character, Finch. He's an engineer living alone in the hostile remains of the planet after it's been devastated by solar flares and an apparent swift war that followed. Throughout the film, he's the only person we see, save flashbacks. There are a couple people sounds, and one glance at something that moves, and a car follows theirs at one point, but no other people in the movie. There's his dog, Goodyear, a little rover named Dewey, and he builds a robot, who chooses the name Jeff. That's the whole cast. The rest is scenery and interaction between them, and occasional story from the past.

It's a good little watch. A little dark, as you might expect a post-apocalyptic movie to be, and in the right spots.The movie starts with Finch looking for supplies with Dewey. They race back to safety just as a huge storm hits. He spends some time cleaning up and with is dog. Then he finishes building Jeff, and teaches him the four laws of robotics--the three we're familiar with, and the fourth is to always preserve the dog. They spend a little time training Jeff to move and participate, with some humorous moments, before heading out before an even bigger storm arrives.

Most of that is in the previews. No real spoilers follow, but just in case...

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The news of late has been abuzz with Netflix's Squid Game. It's been paralleled with Alice in Borderland, which has a tie to deadly games and unwitting players, but this is a bit different.

At the very least, Alice in Borderland is set in Japan, while Squid Game is in Korea. More importantly, Alice in Borderland almost has hints at supernatural or extraterrestrial creation of the games, where the surviving population of Tokyo seems to be forced into playing the games to survive, and failure to do so will result in death from above. Squid Game has some hints of volunteerism in it, where the participants have joined, granted with quite a bit of deception, to play the games. In each, the losers are killed, in an effort to keep the players motivated.

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Scrolling around this afternoon I found a Tom Hanks movie I'd never heard of on Hulu. A quiet little piece, A Hologram for a King is a tale that follows Tom Hanks' character, Alan, as he evidently tries to redeem himself and fulfill some needed life funding, as a salesman for a tech company trying to sell holographic meeting gear to Saudi Arabia, and more specifically, via a meeting with the king.

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After the kids went to bed, I tripped through some not-the-usual streaming offerings, and happened upon a mock documentary (and about) The History of Time Travel on Amazon Prime.

So the mock documentary isn't so not-usual for me. I like real documentaries, as well as some of the mock-umentaries, as long as they're done well. Usually the subject is less important than the delivery. For example, I've enjoyed and recommended (even before now) an interesting history of the toilet. Some of my favorites in school were those that linked wheat to the invention of the fork and nuclear submarine. There are a few good chain-of-invention series on Netflix, but it none as clever as that early film series from the 1970s. At least not that match the fond memories I have of that.

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