this might be the place

More screen time. I watched all of these on Netflix.

Hostage: The British Prime Minister's husband is kidnapped in French Guiana while working with Doctors Without Borders. I watched two episodes across several days, mostly for Julie Delpy as the President of France, but I just didn't care about these people's problems. And then Julie Delpy did a public end-run around the prime minister to get French troops stationed on English soil to stop migrants from entering France from the channel and my entire being just shriveled up and died with how much I didn't like that.

Minx: The evolution of an erotic feminist magazine in the early 1970s. A fun and raunchy show that wants people to succeed and be kind to each other—mostly. The main character, Joyce, is kind of a pill, but part of the fun is watching her become more flexible as she's exposed to new perspectives. The first season is about building a team and putting a magazine together, but the characters lose their way in the second season as they give in to fame and power (or are alienated by it) and the show similarly becomes muddled; appropriate, maybe, but it also felt very unfocused and even cruel at times, quite a departure from the first season. Contains: drug use, nudity, and lots of dicks.

The Staircase (2022): The thing about The Staircase (2004) is that it will make you detest Michael Peterson. Did he kill his wife? Well, an owl certainly didn't do it. Guilty or not, the man is an odious narcissist, and Colin Firth nails him right down to his way of speaking. So I hated him immediately of course. But not in a fun way. The series also stars Toni Collette! And wastes her! Outside of a death scene so raw I wanted to look away, she mainly spends her time drinking and being quietly sad, except for a scene with a leaf blower and two more death scenes that are similarly awful, but similar enough to the first that it kind of dulls the effect over time. The whole thing is pretty tedious, which might be excused in a documentary, but not in a drama. If you've seen one The Staircase, you don't need to see the other, and really, you probably don't need to watch either. It was really great to see Juliette Binoche again, though. Contains: a lot of blood; violence.

fancake's first theme of the year is Crack Treated Seriously! We've already got recs in The Magnus Archives, Disco Elysium/Death Note, Our Flag Means Death, Bungou Stray Dogs, and Star Wars.

Over at the comm, full_metal_ox gave us a delightful glimpse at the character in the banner, writing:

The model has the distinct air of a little kid whose obsessions are the War of 1812 and raccoons, settling in to compose her Magnum Opus alternate history: what if the War of 1812 had been fought by raccoons?

(The history and biology will draw upon rigorous research—including thick ponderous tomes from the Grownup Section, interviews with real live zoologists and re-enactors, and get thee behind me, ChatGPT, thou Devil's Easy Button!—with the result that the text will be as footnote-riddled as Discworld. Writing is Serious Business, for which she dons her Official Serious Writing Jacket—and what other color could it be? Yellow is the hue of intellect, as well as yet another of her Special Interests.)

If you have any questions about this theme, or the comm, come talk to me!