What I'm Watching: Sundance Films, Shrinking, Lady Snowblood, and More

Meiko Kaji, Lady Snowblood, Toho

Here’s everything I watched (and read and heard) this week, and what I thought about it.

The shows:

• Okay, the cat’s out of the bag: re Poker Face. The Peacock series is my favorite Rian Johnson project in recent memory by about a mile, and Natasha Lyonne plays a character who fits her like a glove (even moreso than her Russian Doll role). It’s the most Columbo a show can ever get without actually being Columbo. Star-studded, socially-minded, cozily structured, and wildly stylish, Poker Face deserves a multi-season renewal stat. Here’s my full review.
• Because the universe has a way of evening things out, I love Poker Face but I really dislike (honestly, I want to say hate) Shrinking. The Apple TV+ show about a therapist (Jason Segel) throwing away his rulebook in the wake of his wife’s death is mostly an exhausting mess, with two big asterisks for brilliant comedic performances by Jessica Williams and Harrison Ford. Full review still to come on this one, but I think it’s a total misfire.

The films:

• I watched five films at Sundance this week, including the terribly intense bodybuilder thriller Magazine Dreams, the richly written religious drama The Starling Girl, the much-discussed short story adaptation Cat Person, the asexual romance film Slow, and the  Seneca-Cayuga Reservation-set drama Fancy Dance. If you missed my reviews of all five films from earlier today, you can read those here.
• I wanted to catch one more film on the Criterion Channel before my subscription lapsed (it’s a temporary budget thing), so the other day I ended up checking out the 1973 action saga Lady Snowblood. It’s a stylish and effective movie with a striking lead performance and delightfully designed gore. It’s also a good reminder that Tarantino is kind of a hack, right? That’s rhetorical, everyone calm down.
• Sometimes, if you really love someone, you ask them what movie they want to watch for their birthday, and you put on  whatever they choose. And sometimes they pick the corny gay city-slicker-meets-rancher Christmas movie Dashing in December. So, yeah, I watched that this week! It was probably objectively not good but it had a weirdly star-studded country-pop soundtrack and a hot, non-generic love interest.

The reads:

• Surprise! The reads section makes a triumphant return as I enter week two of regaining my bookworm status. I read lots of books this week, but few stayed in my mind like Tony Fleec’s graphic novel Stray Dogs. Stray Dogs is not for the faint of heart; the blurb on the cover describes it as Silence of the Lambs meets All Dogs Go To Heaven, and that’s not far off. It’s a harrowing, darkly imaginative story that I won’t be able to shake anytime soon.
• Speaking of spooky, I also really enjoyed Fruiting Bodies by Ashley Robin Franklin. It’s a creepy, short comic book about a trio of travelers in the Pacific Northwest whose trip is interrupted by some freaky flora and fauna. I think this one would make a great movie!
• I’ve been dabbling in new adult fantasy, and while I’m usually too picky to finish anything, this week I sped through the audiobook for Joely Sue Burkhart’s Queen Takes Knights. It’s a NSFW sexy vampire book that’s neither outstanding nor bad. I came away from it feeling pretty neutral, but I did like that its polyamorous relationships were actually presented as healthy rather than unsustainable or out of control.
• I also listened to the audiobook for The Girl Who Loved Tom Gordon, a Stephen King survival story about a girl who gets extremely lost in the woods. It wasn’t god-tier King, but I always find his human versus nature books particularly compelling, and Anne Heche was a great narrator.
• I also read two cute webcomic collections this week: Cryptid Club by Sarah Andersen, and Cat’s Cafe by Matt Tarpley. One’s about what cryptids like Bigfoot, Nessie, and co. get up to in their spare time, while the other is about a cat who runs a coffee shop for local critters. Both are very sweet and easy to breeze through. If you’re in the U.S. and haven’t tried the free library-run site Hoopla yet, that’s where I get all my comics!

Odds and ends:

• My extensive coverage of The Last of Us continues this week with something I’m really proud of: a wide-ranging interview I did with cinematographer Eben Bolter. We talked for about an hour and got into serious spoiler territory, so coverage from the interview will be posted steadily over the next two weeks. So far, some highlights include this piece about how the show was his dream job, this one about how the show keeps its scenes well-lit in an era of too-dark TV, and this one (reported on by my coworker) on the show’s use of handheld cameras.
• On the non-interview side of things, I also wrote about Pedro Pascal’s great performance in The Last of Us, and how episode two shows viewers a different side of Joel much earlier on than the game does. Don’t click on this one if you haven’t also played the game!
• One of the co-creators of Sesame Street died this week, and I shed more tears than I have in quite a while putting a little piece of my heart into his obituary.
• My thoughts were scattered putting this one together so I’m not sure it’s my best work, but on Oscar announcement day I went long on Good Luck To You, Leo Grande, and the way award season buzz leaves great performers by the wayside long before nominees are chosen.
• I decided to get a little less serious with The Daily Stream this week, so I wrote about my favorite Disney Channel Original Movie (note: this does not mean the best DCOM), Stuck in the Suburbs.
• I mostly took the week off from listening to podcasts, but I did try out a few episodes of Clear + Vivid, the educational and conversational podcast hosted by 87-year-old screen legend Alan Alda. I can’t believe how much this guy is still doing, and it was really sweet to hear him catch up with Pamela Adlon, who he’s known since she was a little kid.

Whew. That felt like a lot, right? I guess it’s been a bigger week than I thought. What have y’all been up to? What are you eager to start watching or reading in February? Comment and let me know, and have a lovely week!