Well…you know, when you get invested in a show for most of it and then when the show runners try to get “edgy” they screw it all up…and that’s how I feel about the prequel to “Yellowstone” called “1883”….and there are going to be spoilers in this one so if you haven’t finished or seen it yet, probably better to stop reading right now. Up until the last episode, it was a pretty good if violent show but I’m not sure if it was really a true depiction of what life was like on the plains as people moved west…I mean, no boredom or anything like that but just death, death, and more death…much like if Mad Max had taken place on the plains of the US instead of Australia…and at the end, when the entire final episode was a dragged out death of what I saw as the main character…a young woman coming of age on the trail, the investment of the viewer was betrayed by the need of the show runners to continue the shock value that permeated the show…and then when the trail boss played by Sam Elliot kills himself sitting on the beach of the Pacific Ocean after the wagon train falls apart, it was just gratuitous and didn’t need to happen…I know the character had a tough life losing his wife and daughter to disease and then the death of the young woman who had become his ersatz daughter hit him hard, too…but, do we need that much reality? I know that the late 1800’s were pretty whitewashed as we were taught as kids but I wanted to be entertained not slapped in the face and that is just what the ending did. I’m not sure what Taylor Sheridan was thinking when he wrote the show that way, but making your audience work that hard to enjoy some escapism is just too much….and it turned me off “Yellowstone” to be honest…
Category Archives: Misc
“If it keeps on raining, the levee’s going to break…”
Well…yeah, I always wanted to use that line in a title…but, there are no levees out here in Muskegon so I guess the rain that is going on today could be: “if it keeps on raining, the snow is going to melt” since most of the snow out here should be gone after today…I know, much less drama to say the snow is melting versus the levees failing in 1927 along the Mississippi that flooded 26,000 square miles of the Mississippi delta, killed hundreds of people, and forced hundreds of thousands to evacuate. My whole reason for talking about this is that John Paul Jones of Led Zeppelin put together one of those world inclusive songs that included people from around the world playing it in real time over the internet…and I saw it yesterday on one of the news services I read…and I learned that the song was written in 1929 by Joe McCoy and Memphis Minnie and when Zeppelin changed it for Zep 4, they credited the original writers as they did whenever they recorded a song done by one of black blues artists….it’s very seldom that anything can keep my attention for 6+ minutes on the internet but this video did…very cool….
One cool commercial…
Well…there are times when the new commercials during the SB are more exciting than the game itself…I’m not sure if that was true this year but there was one that was pretty cool…in an ad for the new electric Chevy Silverado, they re-created the opening credits to “The Sopranos” with the same song…one of my favorites of all time and they even had the two actors who played Meadow and AJ in it…with Jamie Lynn Sigler doing the Tony Soprano part in the drive into the city….and then having them embracing at the end even answered one question about the ending of “The Sopranos” where the screen just went black and you didn’t know what happened to the family…as a fan, I thought it was pretty cool…
Watched a movie last night…
Well…you would think with being a big sports fan, I would have watched the SB last night especially with Stafford trying to do something he would never have gotten the chance to do if he was still with the Lions…..but I got bored and I am not into hip hop so I skipped the half time show and the second half and watched a movie instead…it was a small little thriller called KIMI about how the big tech companies and their digital assistants like SIRI and Alexa are always listening to everything that is going on in your house if you activate them and there was agoraphobia and murder included… parts of it reminded me of the Coppola movie “The Conversation” which had a similar theme…pretty predictable stuff but it kept me occupied for an hour and a half and that was cool…I did watch The King’s Man the other night, too, and that was a serviceable movie that kept me interested and again got me through a night that would have been boring otherwise…there’s not much else out there that interests me so I guess I won’t be watching anything else soon….
You just gotta love Neil Young…
Well…with what has happened over the past couple of days, you just gotta love Neil Young…not sure if you have heard of this in the news but some idiot low level comedian, Joe Rogan, was given a huge contract with the music service Spotify for his podcast where he spouts right wing talking points all day and has been one of the biggest anti vax assholes out there…almost every one of his shows has these quack doctors on it pushing Ivermectin and all of the other bullshit “cures” for covid along with every lie about the vaccines…and yesterday, Neil Young had had enough…and told spotify that it was Rogan or him…they couldn’t have both on their service and told them he would pull his music if they let Rogan keep spewing his lies…so of course, the right wing assholes who own Spotify chose to keep Rogan since they paid him 100 million dollars for his podcast and they probably believe the crap he spouts….so, Neil, being a person who keeps his word, pulled his entire catalog from Spotify and moved it to Apple music along with many other artists including Barry Manilow if you can believe it…and so many people have been trying to cancel their Spotify subscriptions that the site went down…or that’s what Spotify says…I’ll bet they shut the cancel function down to keep people from being able to cancel their subscriptions, hoping that the whole thing will blow over without too much damage….one thing I can’t understand is why they stay with Rogan…since they allowed him to be a right wing asshole on their service, their stock price has taken a beating with losing almost 25% of it’s value…and if they think this is going to blow over, they just need to look at Twitter where every third post there is in support of Neil and of cancelling their subscriptions…so, keep it up Spotify…ride Rogan right down the tubes to your end…can’t wait to see it…geez…
Chef Andres is a saint…
Well…after the devastating tornados that ripped through the central part of the US, one of the first people there to help was Chef Jose Andres who has been instrumental to feeding people after every disaster since 2010 when he formed his World Central Kitchen…partnering with locals wherever he goes, the WCF has provided over 60 million meals around the world to survivors of natural disasters….but it’s not just food that he delivers…always a positive message that helps people understand that we are all in this together and to treat each other with kindness and respect…something that, in these times, people do need to be reminded of….if you can afford it, please send a few bucks Chef Andres way….this saint needs to be supported….
Deaths in the news today
Well…there were a couple of deaths in the news today that I wanted to talk about…Al Unser of the famous Unser racing family died yesterday at the age of 82….Al was one of the characters that was in racing when I first started to follow it, especially at Indy and for 30 years he was still part of the scene…a great driver that could race anything and won in Nascar, Indycar, USAC, and on dirt and pavement…very smooth style and a personality to go with it. The second one was a little surprising to me when I read that Mike Nesmith of the Monkees died today at the age of 78….I remember the Monkees fondly and his dry wit on the tv show was something that I liked even at 12 years old….born a rich kid and heir to the Liquid Paper fortune….okay most of you probably don’t even remember Liquid Paper but those of us that came of age when typewriters were the only way to do school papers sure do, you would never know that he was a rich kid and I think he was the only one of them who could actually play an instrument when the group was formed for tv….this is starting to happen much too often as I age….more and more people who have been fixtures in life are disappearing at an accelerated rate….not too cool…RIP guys….
Some movies…
Well…with so many new shows out there that I like, I very seldom remind myself to look at the movies section of plex to see if there are any that I have requested in there….and there have been a few…like the new James Bond movie that I thought was pretty good if a bit long…to Red Notice that was also an okay movie but Ryan Reynolds annoys the hell out of me….last night, I watched Shang Chi and the legend of the 10 rings…and that one kept me interested all through it with lots of martial arts fights and good special effects so I’ll call it a good movie…it’s supposed to be in the Marvel universe so there will probably be a sequel to some point and that would be cool….one that hasn’t shown up yet is the Eternals and I would really like to see that one….oh, and the new Beatles movie that I’m almost done with…and that is a fascinating look at the creative process they used to write their songs…it was so cool to see Paul go from a couple of notes to the finished version of Get Back and a lot of the songs on both Let It Be and Abbey Road…I was huge Beatle fan when I was young and even saw Let it Be at the Midtown theater in GR when it came out in 1969…and that entire concert is in the movie and the rest of the movie is about them writing the songs for it…pretty cool…think I’ll go there right now and see if anything hew has been added….
Just saw the best damn thing…
Well…okay, you know I’m a big music geek and love Neil Young and Led Zeppelin, and what I just saw surprised the hell out of me….when I was reading one of my news sites, I came across a video of Neil and Zeppelin doing a live version of “When the levee breaks” and it even had Robert Plant playing guitar…and it was just so cool to see these guys having so much fun and Neil being Neil…now, this is something I would pay big bucks to see…in the same article it alluded to a collaboration between Donald Fagen and David Crosby….now I need to go look for that…
Pretty sad…
Well…this is just a shorty on a sad bit of news that I read in the paper Sunday….Friday night, a young woman drowned in Lake Michigan right off the beach where I go swimming…she and some friends were night swimming….something I’ve done before…and she couldn’t get back through the nasty rip currents that occur off that beach…I’ve been knocked down trying to get back to the beach after swimming and I’ve never felt the currents as strong anywhere else in Lake Michigan….just a sad story that shouldn’t happen to any family….