This movie was about a life-sized robot doll powered by AI, who becomes a protector for her child companion. Then things go wrong. Very wrong.
The movie was ok, but not really my type of horror movie.
My rating: 3/5
truly madly guilty
This book was all about what happened at the barbecue. Of course, you don’t find out what that was for a long time (and the whole story doesn’t come out until the very end), but it made for a compelling read. The story is told in a non-linear fashion, which made it even more compelling.
Lian Moriarity was the author. She also wrote Big Little Lies, which is something I did not read, but watched. I hope they make a series out of this one, too.
My rating: 4/5
plane
This was a pretty entertaining action film. It was about a commercial flight that had to make a crash landing on an island in the Philippines, which happened to be an ungoverened island that was run by terrorists. What unfortunate luck!
My rating: 3.5/5
counterpart
I heard about this show on Reddit and figured I’d check it out. It was pretty great. It’s a shame it didn’t get renewed after the 2nd season, but they wrapped things up pretty nicely, though there was a cliffhanger. I guess we’ll never know what happened.
The show had a really interesting concept: in the late 1980s, a quantum physics experiment went awry and created a parallel universe. Few people knew about the other world though there was an organization that controlled the interactions between the two worlds. People who worked for the organization were basically interworld spies (well, some of them–not everyone was in the loop). It was so interesting how they told the story of the “same” character in each world. J.K. Simmons (who played the main character, but who will always be Vern Schillinger to me), did a great job. I’m not sure how they filmed the scenes where both of his characters interacted, but it was flawless.
I was able to watch this by renting DVDs from Neflix, but those days are coming to an end. Netflix is shutting down its DVD rental program later this year. This will probably put a serious dent in my viewing. We currently have Netflix (DVD & streaming) and Hulu and I was able to watch just about everything I wanted to between the two, but that was mostly thanks to the DVD option. Not everything is streaming (well, maybe it is somewhere but I’m not subscribing to a bunch of different platforms). I have a couple more DVDs to rent and then I’m going to switch to HBO Max. There are a number of HBO shows on my to watch list and they seem to stream a lot of newer movies, so I’m going to give it a shot. I will likely switch between platforms (for example, there are some shows I want to watch on Apple TV+, so I’ll get that at some point in the future–probably once the shows have ended), but I refuse to spend a bunch of money just to watch TV.
My rating: 4/5
the poet
This one was very twisty. Just when you thought things were exposed, it went in another direction. I liked this book, but it took me a while to read. At first glance, it reminded me of Hark! but Connelly managed to pull off a similar idea without being cheesy. For what it’s worth, it was the first book in Michael Connelly’s Jake McEvoy series. I read another book from Connelly a while back and seemed to like that one a bit more, but it was from a different series. Anyway, I’d definitely read him again.
My rating: 3.5/5