The laundry list: Mindhunter and American Vandal on Netflix; Thor: Ragnarok and Kong: Skull Island

Friends, wont’t be much shaking on here today. I’m covered up with chores. Still, I’ve needed to take a few minutes for a laundry list, and now seems like a decent opportunity.

Mindhunter on Netflix

I watched all of the first season of Mindhunter (ten episodes) on Netflix. It’s based on a book of the same name by John E. Douglas and Mark Olshaker. The book and subsequent show are based on Douglas’s career as a criminal profiler for the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit in the late-70s. Douglas is the man whom Thomas Harris based Jack Crawford on in the Hannibal Lecter books.

You take that and you add David Fincher and Charlize Theron as executive producers and an awesome period soundtrack, and what comes out is simply the best TV I’ve seen in a while.

American Vandal on Netflix

I watched this because I read it was worth doing so. It wasn’t. It wasn’t terrible, but if I had the time back I could find more worthwhile things to do with it. Given the subject  and the treatment–it’s based on an investigative student film shot in and around a California high school, when it is just assumed that the school’s long noted bad boy is the perpetrator of the $100,000 in damages that were done when male genitalia were spray-painted on 27 faculty members’ vehicles during an in-service day. Whew. So, yeah, you get what you pay for, I guess.

Again, this wasn’t a horrible experience, and at times it was even enjoyable and interesting, but while it showed me a world I didn’t know anything about, aside from the insight into the teen mind I hope to draw on when the boys are older, it wasn’t a world I needed to know too much about.

Thor: Ragnarok

Did I tell you I saw this? Maybe. Well, I didn’t actually see it; rather, I slept through it. Again, for its target audience, I’m sure this was spot on; I, apparently, wasn’t that.

I’m just kind of getting over the cutesy humor of the Marvel films. Guardians of the Galaxy and Deadpool, I understand. I’ll even go so far as to say, yes, Spider-man reads as a silly kid and Iron Man has a dark and dry sense of humor, but Thor?

I never read the Thor comic, but I did read some Avengers, and I don’t recall Thor having one iota of cute to him. And he never had short hair.

This movie literally begins with the cute, and the haircut comes soon after…’at may as well be a lullaby.

Kong: Skull Island

Finn had been wanting to rent this for a long time, but we had to find a time when it was just him and me. We finally found that time, and, boy but I’m glad we did. I like naps, you see, and, while the third one may have only been for a couple or three minutes, it was still the third one. The song says “Don’t ask her on a straight tequila night”; well, don’t ask me during a three-nap movie.

While I think this movie might have ultimately been too graphic for Finn, he loved it. Boys take that stuff in stride. I did manage to see the last twenty minutes–almost at least–and the final action was interesting enough; they did a good job of making Kong a sympathetic creature. I guess it’s just another one of those intended audience deals, and, like I said, you get what you pay for.

All right, gotta roll. I love you, beauties. Hope this helps.

 

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