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Fire in the Hole

In the early seasons of Justified this was Boyd Crowder’s favorite saying. It comes from an Elmore Leonard short story that served as the genesis for FX’s series Justified. I have watched all 6 seasons of the show a few times now and I also recently watched the new Justified: City Primeval. But this post really isn’t about that, it is more about the last couple of days where I have been sucked into an Elmore Leonard movie hole.

While stumbling around looking for something to watch on Peacock I saw the movie Out of Sight from 1998 and thought, “Ooh, I remember that. Might be fun.” How is i that Jennifer Lopez does look and any older after a quarter of a century, but George Clooney does?

I wondered if I could find some other of Mr. Leonard’s work. Nice, Get Shorty from 1995 is available on Max. This is a masterpiece of casting, all the actors totally inhabit their characters and the comedy tamps down the violence just the right amount.

There was a sequel of sorts 10 years later called Be Cool that had John Travolta’s character, Chilli Palmer breaking int the music business like he did the movie business in Get Shorty. I seem to recall that I did start to watch it on DVD back when it came out, but quit part way in because it was disappointing compared to the first flick. Hey, it is available on Max too, maybe I should try it again. Maybe.

I found the much newer Life of Crime on Frevee and once again I’ve seen it before, but is worth a watch again, if just for the big switch at the end. And Switch is the title of Elmore Leonard book that the movie is based on.

Another late 90s gem of an Elmore Leonard movie is Jackie Brown. A somewhat restrained Quentin Tarantino directed it, but it is only on Netflix and that is one of the streaming service I don’t subscribe to, so I can’t rewatch it.

Doing this research I discovered that Elmore is also responsible for 3:10 to Yuma. Wow, I have a digital copy of the 2007 version with Russel Crowe and Christian Bale. I have also seen the 5 decade older version with Glenn Ford and Van elfin. I’d rewatch the 1957 version if I didn’t have to pay $4 to rent it on Amazon.

Holiday Viewing

Did you know that Iron Man 3 is a holiday movie? I didn’t and I have watched it, albeit several years ago, and don’t remember any Christmasy stuff in it. Well, Plex remembers. When I open the app there on the home page was a section entitled “Home for the Holidays” and Iron Man 3 was right there.

I cued up the movie and watched it. Sure enough there are several scenes that have Christmas decor in the background. In my humble opinion there was not enough to push this to be classified as a holiday movie. I probably last watched it on DVD way back in 2013 when it first came out. Maybe I even got the DVD as a Christmas present that year…still not a Christmas movie.

There were 3 other titles, of the 150 or so movies I have digital copies of, in that “Home for the Holidays” category. And one of those is also a controversial pick, Die Hard. I say no, but the listing gave me an excuse to watch the movie again. Yippie-ki-yay.

Movie number three was definitely a Christmas movie, Elf and this movie is a yearly watch. And we watched it on Thanksgiving weekend when Donna’s brother and family were here.

The last of the four, but not least, was Bad Santa. And I didn’t watch this one this year.

What was conspicuously missing from that list, it even has the word Christmas in the title, was A Moody Christmas. There are two possible reasons for its non-inclusion in the “Home for the Holidays” list. IMDB lists its title as The Moodys without the C word. But probably it is because it is an Australian TV series and TV is already home viewing. This is also a yearly must watch for me during the holidays. There are just six half hour shows with each one covering a dysfunctional family’s annual Christmas lunch in 6 consecutive years.

Hulu Hoops

With football season just around the corner it was time to start thinking about how we were going to get the local channels after cutting half the cord back in February.

To get those football games we had the option of going with either YouTube TV or Hulu. In the end we chose Hulu because for about the same price as YouTube they were offering a bundle that included Disney+ and ESPN+ to go along with that Live TV.

ESPN+ I’m not too sure about, but Disney+ is going to be a treasure chest full of promising stuff. All the Star Wars stuff, the old movies and the new original TV content and the whole Marvel Universe of movies and TV as well.

Hulu has a couple of original series that I’ve heard good things about, but have never seen. Like Only Murders in the Building and The Handmaid’s Tale.

Another big draw to Hulu was it was the home of FX which has a couple of shows I’ve seen and would like to watch again Justified and Better Things. FX also has a few newer shows that sound promising, like Mr Inbetween, Reservation Dogs and The Old Man.

Bye-Bye Miss Apple Pie

Just a week ago I marveled at my free trial of Apple TV+ and how Ted Lasso was my new favorite show. Well, not only is the honeymoon over, but the divorce was just finalized. I cancelled the last six weeks of available streaming today.

The overweight Bedouin seated on the camel’s back was that I ran out of shows or movies I was interested in. I tried out over a dozen series or movies on the service and watched only two things in their totality, Shrinking and Slow Horses.

If they do a second season of Shrinking I won’t miss seeing it, but Slow Horses was a different story because I’m a sucker for British TV. There were two series of the show and I liked the first better than the second, but that was pretty excellent too. They have renewed it for 2 more seasons and when those are produced I might just create a new Apple ID to get another free trial.

But the straw that actually broke the camel’s back was last Wednesday’s episode of Ted Lasso, it was an utter turd. The folks at IMDB who rate the show gave it a 6.5 out of 10. Of the 29 episodes up until last Wednesday, 3 were in the nines, 20 of them were in the 8 range, with a smattering of them in the sevens. There was one episode that was rated 6.8 in season two and it was pretty bad too, but the one before it was a 9.0 and the next two were in the middle eights. If I remember, I’ll look at the next episode’s rating on IMDB.

Ted Lasso Erases A Week Of My Life

In a couple of day’s ago post I mentioned watching the Red Sox playing on MLBTV. Well, one of the commercials in between innings was an offer for a 2 month free trial of Apple TV+. I had the commercial on mute, so I didn’t hear what they were on about, but I thought, “Hmmm, I’ve wanted to check Apple TV+, but never pulled the trigger for one reason or another. This looks a pretty good deal.”

So, I went to apple.co/mlbgift and signed up (offer is good until July 7th if you are interested.) Turns out the reason is that Apple TV+ has the rights to one Friday night baseball game, chosen by MLB maybe, for the season and they also have a 30 minute nightly MLB recap. I have not bothered with the recap show, but I did watch an inning or two of last Friday’s Dodgers Cardinals game. I may keep and eye out for Red Sox game on Fridays between now and June 24th when my free trial ends.

So, anyway, the first show I wanted to check out was this Ted Lasso show all the cool people were talking about. Tuesday night the 18th I watched Season 1 Episode 1. I wasn’t sure what all the fuss was about, it seemed like just another fish out of water story and Jason Sudeikis’s character seemed too broadly drawn and the accent was kind of over the top. I wasn’t going to watch anymore, but as I was talking to Donna about it, I suggested watching Episode 2 on Wednesday at lunch and if she seemed interested we would watch the show together.

She was not interested, so I figured that was that. Later that afternoon, with nothing else going on I thought, let me watch episode three and if I don’t get into it, I’ll move on. After that third show I watched the fourth. I got interested in the arcs of the cast of characters that surround out titular hero and I am a lover of listening to the accents when the Queen’s English is spoken. And I’d become used to the Ted Lasso character.

On Thursday I watched the next four episodes, this left only two episodes of the first season for Friday which lead to rolling right into season two. The only time I came up for air over the the weekend was Sunday night to watch Thursday’s new episode of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel my previous favorite show.

Sometime on Tuesday I ran out of episodes when I finished episode 6 of season three. So now I had to wait until the next day for Apple TV+ to release the next show and after that I’d stuck waiting a whole week between new episodes. I briefly considered waiting for 6 weeks so I could binge those last set of season three’s shows, but couldn’t do it, I watched episode seven the next day when it became available.

Thursday Is The New Friday

According to Amazon, Season 5 of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel was supposed to start on Friday, April 14th, but I just finished watching Episode 1. I’ve run into this before on Amazon Prime, with Season 4 of this show, as well as Season 1 of Reacher last year too. My theory is that it is a time zone thing, it is already tomorrow in Europe (and it is also almost tomorrow on the East Coast right now too), but who knows.

As I mentioned a few weeks ago IMDB had nine episodes listed for this season, but no real dates on the episodes except for April 14, 2023 for the first. I wondered how they would show each episode, and if IMDB is correct, we get all of the first three episodes this week and the following six will come out one at a time every “Friday” until the show finale on May 26th.

I’ve watched episode one and I wonder if I can stretch out the other two episodes during this week gap, say every other day, so as to bridge the gap until episode four next “Friday.” Oh, who am I kidding, I’ll probably watch them tomorrow morning…

Back to the 60’s One More Time

Amazon Prime Video finally let us know when the 5th, and final season of The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel will premire, April 14th,. So, as we have done in the past I thought we should go back and start from the beginning and watch seasons 1, 2, 3 & 4 in preparation for watching season five. Donna opted out of the rewatch, but I’ve gone ahead and started watching them.

I started five days ago with the very first episode, Since then I’ve finished up to the second episode of the third season, or 20 of the 34 episodes made so far. At the rate I’m going I might have enough time before the 14th, to go back and watch all the episodes over again. I won’t, but I could.

I wonder in what form it will get released in? The first three seasons were dumped all at once, season 4 was released two at a time on Fridays. Seasons 1, 3 & 4 had eight episodes and season 2 had 10. Right now IMDB shows that the fifth season will have 9 episodes, so two shows every Friday really wouldn’t unless the final show is a two hour episode.