Re: What Did You Watch? 2024-06-15 (Saturday)

On 6/16/24 7:55 AM, Dimensional Traveler wrote:

What Did You Watch?

I spent much of yesterday doing household chores/cleanup (I will need to finish the cleanup today). So I got through just a few things...:
April Fool's Day (2008 version) (Tubi) - Whoa! How did I not every see this before?!!
    Oh, I see why - it's not very good!! (And probably didn't get rerun much at all on TV...)
    This stars "baby Taylor Cole" (though, this was after "Summerland" - I swear she looks younger here than she did on "Summerland", but I'm probably just remembering this wrong...), "baby Josh Henderson", and "baby Scout Taylor-Compton".
    And I was horrified to learn that their cute, vain married friend was played by an actress who later grew up to be... Mrs. Gavin Newsom!! [spit!] Yuck! [spit!] [spit!]
    Anyway, like I said, while this was generally well filmed, and Cole looks *fabu*!! in this, but this was not a very good movie. And the ending is about what I expected.
    I've seen comments on Reddit praising the 1987 original "April Fool's Day" film, but that one is not available on any of my streamers (not even Tubi) right now...
golf - Bah! Bryson DeChambeau surged on Day 3 of the U.S. Open to take a 3 stroke lead. I'm not saying DeChambeau has this thing sown up, but he does seem to have this thing mostly sown up, unless he chokes on the final day.
Station Eleven (Max) - Ep's #9 & #10, the last two episodes.
    The first half(? third?) of ep. #9 was decent, as we go back to follow-up on what happened to Jeevan and Kirsten after they left Frank's apartment. Then, we find out, as I had anticipated earlier, that Jeeven didn't die afterall - but I did not like where the second half of this episode ended up.
    The finale was way, way, *way* too Pollyanna-ish - none of the bad guys are punished (like, *at all*!) for their crimes, old friends reunite, I guess Miranda dies in the initial die-off, and then everyone parts on good terms.
    That was a whole lot of spin-up, for a whole lot of very little. [roll]
    I did like Jeevan's complaining about the Station Eleven graphic novel being "so pretentious!" in ep. #9 - spot on.  ;)
    P.S. The character of the teenager Alex (Philippine Velge), who appears to be novel to the TV series and not from the original book, is a mess - all over the place in allegiances and motivations. Just poorly written.
    P.P.S. It looks like a lot of the problems I have are with the TV series adaptation - from reading the original novel's plotline on Wiki, it looks like the TV series departed heavily from the original novel's storyline, esp. the ending.
Yoga Teacher Killer: The Kaitlin Armstrong Story (Lifetime) - This was pretty much exactly what I expected - Lifetime's take is, not surprisingly, that Armstrong was an incredibly insecure/needy, bat-shit *crazy* woman.
    (I like how the subplot was that Armstrong's background in "finance" made her a bad yoga teacher! - Like "finance" is somehow the root of all EVOL!!1!  ;>  )
    Armstrong here is played by Caity Lotz (is this typecasting?!  ;p  ).
    The movie also posits that her on-again-off-again boyfriend, Colin Strickland the cyclist (Kyle Schmid), was a major dummy and douche bag, something you could easily pick up from the concurrent articles on the case as it unfolded in 2022. (Though his friend in the film who dumps him after the murder comes off as an even bigger douche that Strickland!)
    The victim, Moriah Wilson (Larissa Dias, who earlier in her career went by Larissa Albuquerque), is portrayed as completely innocent and an unjustified victim, which seems right.
    It's amazing that Armstrong was able to beat it out of the country like she did - the movie portrays it like she was just 2 minutes ahead of the cops, but I doubt it was that dramatic. The movie also sort of implies that Armstrong's sister was complicit in this, but she was never charged AFAIK.
And what did you watch?