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w/e 2022-12-25

I was going to leave weeknotes for a week, but I feel the need to keep up with the Joneses Bartletts and Stuarts.

§ We went to a funeral this week, for a lovely man who was a friend-of-the-family-in-law. Lots of people, lots of nice words. Because I so rarely go to any religious events I had forgotten quite how religious religious events are. It’s another world, so alien to me. Also, we seem to have not caught covid, despite mingling with so many people.

§ This week I moved the Pepys site from Heroku to my VPS, the last site I had to move so I won’t bore you with more of this. Only took a couple of hours this time, with no unexpected hiccups. There are a few little things to tweak with Pepys before the start of the year when the third decade-long reading of the diary begins.

§ Movies watched this week:

  • The Wonder (Sebastián Lelo, 2022) – It was OK. Maybe one of those movies that I’d have got more out of in a cinema but at home I got a bit bored and distracted. Also, I’m all for interesting postmodern(?) treatments but the opening and closing moments seemed pointless.
  • Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery (Rian Johnson, 2022) – I seem to remember the first one was OK but after the first half hour or so I was bored. Didn’t care what happened to any of the characters. But, you know, everyone else loves it.
  • A Charlie Brown Christmas (Bill Melendez, 1965) – I’ve probably seen this before, decades ago, and it was as lovely as I remembered/hoped.
  • A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon (Will Becher, Richard Phelan, 2019) – I can’t remember if I’ve seen the first one but this was excellent. Predictable but lovely.

We finished watching season five of Snowfall (on iPlayer) which was still good. I never see it mentioned in lists of good TV series but I guess it’s popular enough to make it to (soon) six seasons. I guess one flaw, for me, sometimes, is that it’s not very deep. Despite linking the drug trade with the CIA’s funding of wars, it doesn’t have the same feeling of reach or depth that The Wire did, for example.

We’ve also watched season three of The Sinner (Netflix). We watched the first two a few years back and it was pretty good, and I always like watching Bill Pullman squinting his way to solving crimes. But this season has been really bad! After a couple of episodes it was only the inertia of two seasons and some curiosity about what they were doing that kept us going.

Had we then looked at the show’s per-episode ratings which, for this season, drop gradually from 7.8 to 6.9 before the final episode’s terrible 5.6, we’d have stopped there. But we only looked that up two episodes from the end at which point we wanted to see how it got so bad, which we’ve been doing while I write these weeknotes.

So much of the season gives the impression of being wildly mysterious and strange when it isn’t. And there are so many things people do that make no sense – not even extreme murder-y things, just normal behaviours that are, “why would anyone do that?!”

OK, finished the final episode and we’re not sure why its ratings were so much worse than the others but it also didn’t get any better.

Still, the Motherland Christmas special was fun.

Merry etc.