What I Watched in 2023 (July to December)
Dec. 30th, 2023 07:55 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
forestsofpineHere's January to June 2023, and here's 2022.
I don't know what was up with my attention span in the second half of this year, it was really bad. I kept starting new TV shows and getting sidetracked (my watchlist on MyDramaList is such a mess right now), so I didn't finish very many and decided to throw in some movies to pad things out. Listed in chronological order by when I finished, first to last:
The Eighth Sense (MDL)
The Eighth Sense is a Korean BL series that got a lot of buzz in the first half of the year. It's longer than a typical Korean BL (10 episodes of about 30-40 minutes each) and has an emotional storyline that deals heavily with trauma and depression on the way to its happy ending.
It's about Jihyun, a shy boy from the country who catches the eye of a handsome, popular senior named Jaewon during his freshman year of college at Seoul and joins the surfing club to get closer with him. The main couple had very good chemistry and there was even a brief but lovely sex scene full of laughter and tenderness. Because of the longer length, there were several side characters who got fleshed out more than average for a Korean BL and who were pretty delightful, including Jihyun's boss, Jihyun's friends Joon Pyo and Ae Ri, and Jaewon's friend Yoon Won, the president of the surfing club.
Jaewon's other friends were significantly less pleasant, to the point that one wondered a little why even a people pleaser like Jaewon tolerated them for so long. There was also an especially cruel cliffhanger at one point that I thought stepped over the line into being overly manipulative. Overall, despite some minor quibbles like these, it was one of my favorites of the Korean BLs I've seen.
Nomadland (2020)
I've been wanting to watch this for awhile, and finally watched it on a plane this summer. Tbh, it was a little too depressing to make good plane viewing, but well-acted and with lots of sharp commentary on the state of the USA, including some much more radical stuff than I expected.
Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023)
This, on the other hand, was excellent plane viewing, and a really fun movie! I had a blast watching it despite very limited knowledge of the RPG.
Mafia Mamma (2023)
More plane viewing, rather meh in this case, but Monica Bellucci is one of the hottest women on the planet, so at least it had that much going for it.
Should have been Kristen/Bianca endgame 😜
Speed (1994)
Somehow I never watched this before. It was very tense and a lot of fun - I can definitely see why it was such a massive hit back then. My only complaint was that...
I didn't like that they made her a damsel in distress at the end and thought the final showdown dragged on a little too long as a result.
A Man Called Otto (2022)
One of those films that's a little bit too obvious about manipulating your emotions, but I kinda fell for it anyway and lost track of how many times I teared up and/or cried outright while watching.
Death on the Nile (1978)
I think I watched this once as a teenager, but that was a long time ago and I'd pretty much forgotten it. Gosh, what an incredible cast! I could have done without the buffoonish portrayal of the Egyptian characters, but overall, it's still a very fun movie, and a brilliant mystery, of course.
I saw the David Suchet version (starring a young Emily Blunt as Linnet) just a few years ago and very much enjoyed that one, too. I have not watched the recent Branagh adaptation, as I've yet to hear of a fan of the book who liked it.
Only Friends (MDL)
This is the second Jojo show in a row (the first being The Warp Effect - see my Jan-June reviews) where I really enjoyed the show overall, but had some issues with the ending. I'm probably going to have to check out some more of his shows to see if that's a consistent pattern or just a fluke.
The parts I did like, I really liked. The relationships were as messy and toxic as promised by the trailer and the show added multiple candidates to the running for the title of GMMTV's best-ever sex scene. It might even sweep the category, to be honest. Kudos to Neo in particular for his efforts to raise the standard. The infamous car sex scene with Force was great, but he and Mark also killed it in their scenes together.
First and Khaotung have blown me away with their chemistry in all their series together, and they were fantastic as Sand and Ray. Even when I wanted to smack them both over the head for stupid choices, I was rooting for them. I have also enjoyed Neo and Mark a lot in their previous roles and they did wonderfully as Boston and Nick both in and out of bed. Most of the side cast impressed me, too. I especially enjoyed Mond as Boeing, who was clearly having a blast with his role.
In regards to my issues with the ending, the short and vague version is I didn't think it was necessarily a bad ending for any of the main characters - overall, it was a pretty good one, in fact - but it nevertheless left some things unaddressed in a way that felt oddly mean-spirited to me after the amount of compassion Jojo displayed towards alternative sexual identities and preferences in The Warp Effect.
Do I recommend it? Yes, as I said, I did enjoy it and was certainly invested while watching it. But I recommend it with some unexpected reservations.
🔞 NSFW audio and visuals in this trailer, including a clip of the aforementioned car sex scene
Napoleon
I've heard complaints that this was boring, but I didn't think so. However, it was definitely very rushed in between battle scenes and I don't know how coherent it would be without at least a basic knowledge of Napoleon's life. I was arguably in a sweet spot where I knew enough about him to follow along but not enough to be seriously bothered by the (reportedly numerous) historical inaccuracies.
The larger issue I had with the film was that Napoleon had zero charisma, and while I don't know that much about his personality, I think surely a dude who was literally a self-made emperor must have been fairly charismatic. In the film, he was consistently out-charisma'd by Josephine, which might be true to real life even if he was actually a charismatic guy, but surely not to such a degree??
Idk. It's a Ridley Scott historical film, so I went in expecting more of a spectacle than a great film. If that's your expectation, I don't think you'll be disappointed, but it wasn't as good as it could have been, or ought to have been, in the hands of a different director, given the fascinating subject matter.
A Biltmore Christmas
A Hallmark Christmas movie about a writer who accidentally time travels back to the set of a (fictional) 1947 classic Christmas film and falls in love with one of the stars. Actually really charming and sweet for what is essentially an 84 minute tourism commercial for the Biltmore Estate.
The Silencing
A bleak thriller about an alcoholic former hunter who quit hunting and turned himself into a game warden after his daughter's mysterious disappearance, only to get sucked into the search for a serial killer when another teen girl's body is found five years later. It's well acted and has some pretty tense moments, but I had trouble getting past how stupidly people kept behaving: going into a suspected serial killer's house alone, trying to chase down a serial killer alone in the woods using a truck that consistently stalls and needs a jump... heck, going into a remote forest in the middle of a Minnesota winter with a truck that consistently stalls and needs a jump is stupid even without a serial killer hanging out in there. At the very least you'd think he'd have picked up a portable car battery after the third or fourth time he got stuck.
Agatha Christie's Poirot
I didn't want to finish out the year on that depressing note, so I picked out... more murder mysteries, lol. I've never seen a full season of this show, and definitely never watched one straight through, but I love Agatha Christie and enjoy David Suchet as Poirot, so it's a good thing to pick up when nothing else is leaping out at me in the DVD section of the library.
This time we watched Dumb Witness and Hallowe'en Party.
I was pretty sure I read Dumb Witness back during my teenage Agatha Christie phase, but realized almost immediately that I couldn't remember it at all, so maybe I misremembered reading it or confused it with a different one. Or maybe I just read too many too quickly back then and forgot it, I don't know. It was good, I'm definitely going to have to go back and (re?)read the book.
Hallowe'en Party was a bloodbath, gosh, and the ending was kind of soap opera-ish, imo, so I didn't care for it as much, but it had a surprisingly good cast with some great British character actors, so I at least enjoyed the performances.
2023 Verdict
And that's it, unless I watch something else before 11:59 PM tomorrow, in which case I guess I'll just have to come back and edit this post.
2023 was a weaker year for me than 2022 in terms of both the number of dramas and TV shows I watched, and how much I enjoyed them. Although I enjoyed everything I finished this year, there were only a few that were as memorable as the string of outstanding dramas I watched in 2022 that included Beyond Evil, Mr. Queen, Bad Buddy, Semantic Error, and more.
The standout for me from 2023 was Moonlight Chicken (see my review in the January to June post), which I adored to pieces. A Tale of Thousand Stars (released in 2021, but watched this year), plus the ATOTS x Bad Buddy episodes of Our Skyy 2, and The Eighth Sense were my runners up. Despite my issues with the endings, The Warp Effect and Only Friends were probably numbers 4 and 5 for 2023 due to how much fun they were overall.
I never got back into the habit of seeing movies in theaters after my kids got old enough to make it feasible without a babysitter, and the pandemic reduced the frequency even more, but we did start to see a few more in theaters again this year, so that was nice. We also went to live theater three times this year for the first time in years, and that was even nicer!
Although there's still a bunch of 2023 releases on my to-watch list, of the movies I did watch this year, my favorites were Death on the Nile (1978), Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, Everything Everywhere All At Once, Speed, and Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves.
My favorite live theater experience was seeing the production of a play written by my brother. He's had a number of short works performed in recent years, but this was his first full-length production, so that was pretty damn cool.
Second place was seeing the touring production of Les Mis. Unlike my brother, I was too shy to really qualify as a theater kid in high school, but I was friends with a lot of theater kids, and seeing it live for the second time brought back a lot of nostalgic memories for me of soundtrack singalongs and friendly arguments over who was the best Eponine. I was also thrilled to finally get to take my spouse and kids to see it (their first times), and even more thrilled when they loved it as much as I did.
Happy watching, and here's hoping for more great TV shows, movies, and theater in 2024!
I don't know what was up with my attention span in the second half of this year, it was really bad. I kept starting new TV shows and getting sidetracked (my watchlist on MyDramaList is such a mess right now), so I didn't finish very many and decided to throw in some movies to pad things out. Listed in chronological order by when I finished, first to last:
The Eighth Sense (MDL)
The Eighth Sense is a Korean BL series that got a lot of buzz in the first half of the year. It's longer than a typical Korean BL (10 episodes of about 30-40 minutes each) and has an emotional storyline that deals heavily with trauma and depression on the way to its happy ending.
It's about Jihyun, a shy boy from the country who catches the eye of a handsome, popular senior named Jaewon during his freshman year of college at Seoul and joins the surfing club to get closer with him. The main couple had very good chemistry and there was even a brief but lovely sex scene full of laughter and tenderness. Because of the longer length, there were several side characters who got fleshed out more than average for a Korean BL and who were pretty delightful, including Jihyun's boss, Jihyun's friends Joon Pyo and Ae Ri, and Jaewon's friend Yoon Won, the president of the surfing club.
Jaewon's other friends were significantly less pleasant, to the point that one wondered a little why even a people pleaser like Jaewon tolerated them for so long. There was also an especially cruel cliffhanger at one point that I thought stepped over the line into being overly manipulative. Overall, despite some minor quibbles like these, it was one of my favorites of the Korean BLs I've seen.
Nomadland (2020)
I've been wanting to watch this for awhile, and finally watched it on a plane this summer. Tbh, it was a little too depressing to make good plane viewing, but well-acted and with lots of sharp commentary on the state of the USA, including some much more radical stuff than I expected.
Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves (2023)
This, on the other hand, was excellent plane viewing, and a really fun movie! I had a blast watching it despite very limited knowledge of the RPG.
Mafia Mamma (2023)
More plane viewing, rather meh in this case, but Monica Bellucci is one of the hottest women on the planet, so at least it had that much going for it.
Sort of spoilery, I guess?
Should have been Kristen/Bianca endgame 😜
Speed (1994)
Somehow I never watched this before. It was very tense and a lot of fun - I can definitely see why it was such a massive hit back then. My only complaint was that...
does anyone care about spoilers for a 30 year old movie?
I didn't like that they made her a damsel in distress at the end and thought the final showdown dragged on a little too long as a result.
A Man Called Otto (2022)
One of those films that's a little bit too obvious about manipulating your emotions, but I kinda fell for it anyway and lost track of how many times I teared up and/or cried outright while watching.
Death on the Nile (1978)
I think I watched this once as a teenager, but that was a long time ago and I'd pretty much forgotten it. Gosh, what an incredible cast! I could have done without the buffoonish portrayal of the Egyptian characters, but overall, it's still a very fun movie, and a brilliant mystery, of course.
I saw the David Suchet version (starring a young Emily Blunt as Linnet) just a few years ago and very much enjoyed that one, too. I have not watched the recent Branagh adaptation, as I've yet to hear of a fan of the book who liked it.
Only Friends (MDL)
This is the second Jojo show in a row (the first being The Warp Effect - see my Jan-June reviews) where I really enjoyed the show overall, but had some issues with the ending. I'm probably going to have to check out some more of his shows to see if that's a consistent pattern or just a fluke.
The parts I did like, I really liked. The relationships were as messy and toxic as promised by the trailer and the show added multiple candidates to the running for the title of GMMTV's best-ever sex scene. It might even sweep the category, to be honest. Kudos to Neo in particular for his efforts to raise the standard. The infamous car sex scene with Force was great, but he and Mark also killed it in their scenes together.
First and Khaotung have blown me away with their chemistry in all their series together, and they were fantastic as Sand and Ray. Even when I wanted to smack them both over the head for stupid choices, I was rooting for them. I have also enjoyed Neo and Mark a lot in their previous roles and they did wonderfully as Boston and Nick both in and out of bed. Most of the side cast impressed me, too. I especially enjoyed Mond as Boeing, who was clearly having a blast with his role.
In regards to my issues with the ending, the short and vague version is I didn't think it was necessarily a bad ending for any of the main characters - overall, it was a pretty good one, in fact - but it nevertheless left some things unaddressed in a way that felt oddly mean-spirited to me after the amount of compassion Jojo displayed towards alternative sexual identities and preferences in The Warp Effect.
Do I recommend it? Yes, as I said, I did enjoy it and was certainly invested while watching it. But I recommend it with some unexpected reservations.
🔞 NSFW audio and visuals in this trailer, including a clip of the aforementioned car sex scene
Napoleon
I've heard complaints that this was boring, but I didn't think so. However, it was definitely very rushed in between battle scenes and I don't know how coherent it would be without at least a basic knowledge of Napoleon's life. I was arguably in a sweet spot where I knew enough about him to follow along but not enough to be seriously bothered by the (reportedly numerous) historical inaccuracies.
The larger issue I had with the film was that Napoleon had zero charisma, and while I don't know that much about his personality, I think surely a dude who was literally a self-made emperor must have been fairly charismatic. In the film, he was consistently out-charisma'd by Josephine, which might be true to real life even if he was actually a charismatic guy, but surely not to such a degree??
Idk. It's a Ridley Scott historical film, so I went in expecting more of a spectacle than a great film. If that's your expectation, I don't think you'll be disappointed, but it wasn't as good as it could have been, or ought to have been, in the hands of a different director, given the fascinating subject matter.
A Biltmore Christmas
A Hallmark Christmas movie about a writer who accidentally time travels back to the set of a (fictional) 1947 classic Christmas film and falls in love with one of the stars. Actually really charming and sweet for what is essentially an 84 minute tourism commercial for the Biltmore Estate.
The Silencing
A bleak thriller about an alcoholic former hunter who quit hunting and turned himself into a game warden after his daughter's mysterious disappearance, only to get sucked into the search for a serial killer when another teen girl's body is found five years later. It's well acted and has some pretty tense moments, but I had trouble getting past how stupidly people kept behaving: going into a suspected serial killer's house alone, trying to chase down a serial killer alone in the woods using a truck that consistently stalls and needs a jump... heck, going into a remote forest in the middle of a Minnesota winter with a truck that consistently stalls and needs a jump is stupid even without a serial killer hanging out in there. At the very least you'd think he'd have picked up a portable car battery after the third or fourth time he got stuck.
Agatha Christie's Poirot
I didn't want to finish out the year on that depressing note, so I picked out... more murder mysteries, lol. I've never seen a full season of this show, and definitely never watched one straight through, but I love Agatha Christie and enjoy David Suchet as Poirot, so it's a good thing to pick up when nothing else is leaping out at me in the DVD section of the library.
This time we watched Dumb Witness and Hallowe'en Party.
I was pretty sure I read Dumb Witness back during my teenage Agatha Christie phase, but realized almost immediately that I couldn't remember it at all, so maybe I misremembered reading it or confused it with a different one. Or maybe I just read too many too quickly back then and forgot it, I don't know. It was good, I'm definitely going to have to go back and (re?)read the book.
Hallowe'en Party was a bloodbath, gosh, and the ending was kind of soap opera-ish, imo, so I didn't care for it as much, but it had a surprisingly good cast with some great British character actors, so I at least enjoyed the performances.
2023 Verdict
And that's it, unless I watch something else before 11:59 PM tomorrow, in which case I guess I'll just have to come back and edit this post.
2023 was a weaker year for me than 2022 in terms of both the number of dramas and TV shows I watched, and how much I enjoyed them. Although I enjoyed everything I finished this year, there were only a few that were as memorable as the string of outstanding dramas I watched in 2022 that included Beyond Evil, Mr. Queen, Bad Buddy, Semantic Error, and more.
The standout for me from 2023 was Moonlight Chicken (see my review in the January to June post), which I adored to pieces. A Tale of Thousand Stars (released in 2021, but watched this year), plus the ATOTS x Bad Buddy episodes of Our Skyy 2, and The Eighth Sense were my runners up. Despite my issues with the endings, The Warp Effect and Only Friends were probably numbers 4 and 5 for 2023 due to how much fun they were overall.
I never got back into the habit of seeing movies in theaters after my kids got old enough to make it feasible without a babysitter, and the pandemic reduced the frequency even more, but we did start to see a few more in theaters again this year, so that was nice. We also went to live theater three times this year for the first time in years, and that was even nicer!
Although there's still a bunch of 2023 releases on my to-watch list, of the movies I did watch this year, my favorites were Death on the Nile (1978), Puss in Boots: The Last Wish, Everything Everywhere All At Once, Speed, and Dungeons and Dragons: Honor Among Thieves.
My favorite live theater experience was seeing the production of a play written by my brother. He's had a number of short works performed in recent years, but this was his first full-length production, so that was pretty damn cool.
Second place was seeing the touring production of Les Mis. Unlike my brother, I was too shy to really qualify as a theater kid in high school, but I was friends with a lot of theater kids, and seeing it live for the second time brought back a lot of nostalgic memories for me of soundtrack singalongs and friendly arguments over who was the best Eponine. I was also thrilled to finally get to take my spouse and kids to see it (their first times), and even more thrilled when they loved it as much as I did.
Happy watching, and here's hoping for more great TV shows, movies, and theater in 2024!
no subject
Date: 2023-12-30 04:26 pm (UTC)I too loved the Dungeons & Dragons movie. I watched it with only fandom osmosis and it worked very well.
no subject
Date: 2023-12-30 04:55 pm (UTC)I was on some miserably long flights this summer and the D&D movie really helped salvage one of them. It was delightful!
no subject
Date: 2023-12-30 07:18 pm (UTC)I've also heard a lot of thing about Only Friends. *g*
The DnD movie was sooo good! I'm also unfamiliar with the game, I only know the veeery basics, but it wasn't necessary for the movie. The fans got a lot of easter eggs in it, but for anyone unfamilair with the game, it still worked great as a movie. I hope there'll be a sequel even though it didn't make all that much money in theatres. I think it would've done better if the Mario movie hadn't released a week after it...
Puss in Boots also was sooo good! I love that movie to pieces, absolutely fantastic!
It's been a while since I saw the old Death on the Nile. I saw the new one by Branagh though and it was meh. There were a lot of things that kinda annoyed me in it and I found part of the ending to be a kind of downer for me. I liked Branagh's first Poirot adaptation well enough, but this one didn't catch me at all.
no subject
Date: 2024-01-01 03:32 pm (UTC)I've also heard a lot of thing about Only Friends. *g*
Haha, I can imagine! It's a messy, messy show (mostly in a good way) and there were a lot of spectacularly wrong takes out there from people who couldn't handle the mess, as well as plenty more that were technically valid interpretations that nevertheless made me grit my teeth and hold myself back from commenting. Let's just say that it's a show that provokes strong feelings, haha.
Both Puss in Boots: The Last Wish and the D&D movie were such pleasant surprises! I enjoyed both far more than I would have expected as someone who's not really into either franchise.
Yeah, everybody I know who's seen the Branaugh Death of the Nile has been unimpressed. It's such a shame! I love the book; along with Five Little Pigs it's one of the Christies I reread most often. At least we have the 1978 version and the David Suchet version, I thought they both did a good job with it.