{"id":4593,"date":"2019-01-14T08:54:54","date_gmt":"2019-01-14T07:54:54","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/?p=4593"},"modified":"2019-02-04T11:55:24","modified_gmt":"2019-02-04T10:55:24","slug":"things-to-watch-and-read","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/?p=4593","title":{"rendered":"Things to Watch and Read"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\"\"
Strange Weather (photo courtesy of Keizertimes) <\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

There is nothing I love more than rewatching things. Series, movies, YouTube videos. Squirrels pretending to be people. My happy place is coming home in the early evening, putting on the most amorphous clothing I can find and cooking dinner while an episode of Parks and Recreation <\/em>that I have seen 127 times plays in the background. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Due to the fact that I now often watch things with someone\nelse and the fact that my cat has been complaining about my viewing choices, I\nhave been intaking new things. And so I can now enjoy another great joy \u2013 being\nthe last person on earth to discover something and acting as though I am the\nfirst.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Watership Down <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This is a Netflix series based on Richard Adams\u2019 novel. If\nyou have read the novel you have probably said aloud \u201cI can\u2019t believe I\u2019m\nreading a novel about rabbits\u201d just before shrieking \u201cPlease don\u2019t die, rabbits!\u201d\nthrough streams of masculine tears. The only thing more disturbing than reading\nthat previous sentence is the 1978 miniseries which is a tripped out interpretation\nwhich resembles what would come out of a weekend collaboration of Salvatore Dali,\nHunter Thompson, and four hundred tabs of Yellow Sunshine. I watched the\nversion in the early 1980s and didn\u2019t get over it until last weekend.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Netflix got it right. The story is fantastic, the characters\nso unbelievably and lapinely lovable  and\nif you can find something more endearing than rabbits speaking in British\naccents then I will buy you a house.   <\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

The Passage (possible spoilers, but not really big ones)<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If you like books in which shit hits the fan, then you need\nto read this book. Because shit hits the fan in this book, then the fan becomes\nshit, and the shit that had hit the fan becomes shit again and the world explodes\ninto shit. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

A story about military experiments on \u201cvampires\u201d gone (insanely)\nwrong results in the end of the world. End part one. Part two is a future world\nunder the reign of said vampires and the epic journeys that some of these\ncharacters take in order to try to brighten their world a wee bit. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

There\u2019s nothing not to like, folks. Adventure, a whole new\nworld to get lost in, no holds barred horror, and writing so solid you wish your\nlife could be narrated by Justin Cronin. I mean, without the perpetual misery and\nvampires.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Strange Weather <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Joe Hill needs to be read. Now. These four novellas are all\nhorrorish in some way. Hill is Stephen King\u2019s son, in case you were the last\nperson on earth to know that, and he obviously inherited his dad\u2019s knack for\nwriting stories that can freak you the fuck out and characters that fly off the\npage. Only, and tell anyone I said this, he\u2019s better than his dad. Hill is one\nof the best writers out there these days. He writes characters you root for and\ntells stories that boggle the mind with their ingenuity, creativity, and freakiness.\nIt\u2019s raining nails, a man gets shipwrecked on a cloud, a camera that steals you\nsoul, and a mall guard who goes nowhere good. I can\u2019t tell you how much you\nneed to read this book. Also, Hill really shines in the novella form. It\u2019s the medium\nwith the perfect length to tell a story with little frill but enough to build a\nworld in which to capture us, entertain us, and horrify us. Read this.   <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Big Mouth <\/p>\n\n\n\n

An animated adult comedy series which tells the story of a\ngroup of kids going through puberty. But we\u2019re not talking The Brady Bunch<\/em> puberty. We\u2019re talking about all of the vile\naspects, the extraordinarily disturbing and horny ideas that we all had (um\u2026have)\nwhile our hormones skyrocket into the stratosphere. Also the Hormone Monster is\na character. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

This ain\u2019t for the weak.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

I was introduced to Nick Kroll from Parks and Recreation<\/em> (long live the Douche!) and was quickly enamored\nwith this guy\u2019s style of piecemeal ironic comedy. Throw in the soundtrack which\nincludes such hits as Everybody Bleeds<\/em>,\nEjaculation<\/em>, and Life is a Mess<\/em> and you have something to listen to in the car as\nwell.  <\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Ballad of Buster Scruggs <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Every week I peruse movie trailers and book charts for one\nthing: a good western. Unfortunately, these are few and far between and I have\nbeen forced to eke by on the occasional offerings of the entertainment gods. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

Fortunately the Coen brothers exist. To be honest, this film\nwas not what I expected, but as most things the Coen brothers do it did not\ndisappoint. Six shorts about life on the frontier done with the visual vibrancy,\nthe sardonic humor, and the undercurrent of disturbia that the Coen brothers\nhave perfected is enough to satisfy your hunger for westerns that don\u2019t suck. Because\nthose things are needed to tell a good western and nobody does it better than\nthese guys. By \u201csatisfy your hunger\u201d I mean that I spent the remainder of the weekend\nrewatching every western I could find and ordering McMurtry and McCarthy\u2019s\nentire catalog off of Amazon. If you are a western nut, you have to watch this.\nPlus, Tom Waits.     <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Strange Weather (photo courtesy of Keizertimes) There is nothing I love more than rewatching things. Series, movies, YouTube videos. Squirrels pretending to be people. My happy place is coming home in the early evening, putting on the most amorphous clothing I can find and cooking dinner while an episode of Parks and Recreation that I […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4594,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-4593","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/damiengaleone.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/01\/Strange-Weather.jpg?fit=1280%2C640&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p1EvEu-1c5","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4593","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=4593"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4593\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4595,"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4593\/revisions\/4595"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4594"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=4593"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=4593"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/damiengaleone.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=4593"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}