I used to be able to write quick blog posts like this at work without my boss knowing about it.

A blog has to start somewhere.

Here are some quick thoughts on what I watched this past week.

Killers of the Flower Moon (2023) There's a really interesting story about the Osage here. Instead, Scorsese chooses to tell another boring gangster story. It also falls into the biopic trap, trying to compress way too much history in a runtime that cannot handle that scope.

Friends "The One After the Super Bowl" Watching Stalking Laura and discussing it with others was one of my most fun movie experiences of 2025, especially when we discovered a day or two later that Richard Thomas was coming to Binghamton and the stalking jokes continued for a couple of weeks. I hate Friends, but I watched this episode because it has Brooke Shields playing a stalker just a couple of years after she played a woman stalked. To give her credit, her hand-licking scene was the highlight of the episode. Do yourself a favor and just watch a clip of that scene online.

Pluribus "La Chica o El Mundo" It's impossible to talk about Pluribus, especially this episode of Pluribus, without spoilers. I was annoyed by the show early on and also just unimpressed by its sort of baseline visual mediocrity (which is unfair; it always looks good, it just always also looks boring) and forgettable score. But mostly I hate the show because the premise is not strong enough to support an entire season, let alone multiple seasons. It might have been good as a single Twilight Zone or Treehouse of Horror episode. It's not good as an ongoing story. One evidence of that is how the writers have already introduced incomprehensible character choices, establishing a character one way, then having that character act a completely opposite way, then back again. I'm suspending my disbelief for the premise. Don't make me do it for the character motivations too.

The 3 Godfathers (1936) It doesn't quite have the humor or the heart of Ford's 1948 version, but it's still pretty strong. This was my favorite watch of December (which I think is safe to say with only 3 days left in it).

The Last Unicorn (1982) I didn't grow up with this one and so have zero nostalgia for it. I had just finished reading the book for the Fantasy Freaks Book Club and we watched it together prior to our discussion. The film's fine. I didn't love the book. I definitely didn't love the movie. It streamlines the book's plot and makes for a nice enough kiddie fantasy adventure plot, but it takes out most of the flourishes and asides that make Beagle's book interesting at all as a fictional meta-commentary on fantasy fiction.

Star Trek: The Next Generation "Code of Honor" Three episodes into a re-watch of TNG and it seems like the show only gets worse each episode. It's amazing it got a Season 2. At one point, Picard says, "You may excel in technology, but not in civilized behavior" to a very African-coded alien leader. TNG sometimes leans hard into a European Enlightenment Imperialism and it does that here. I read about the episode after watching it and was at least heartened to know that most of the actors and crew were embarrassed of the episode at the time and to the present. The episode is not all bad. It does at least give us a scene of Data telling a joke to Geordi.