It’s hard to be an art student when classes are cancelled and you have to learn through Zoom video chat. Luckily, I’ve finished all of my major classes, and I’m just taking electives this semester (plus my film production internship, which has definitely suffered in this turn to telecommuting).
Why does this matter? I had more time to watch shit this week (ya know, in order to escape the misery that is living alone in a pandemic-stemmed self-isolation and the knowledge that you’re entire last semester of college and all of your post-college plans have been destroyed in less than a week)!
Firstly, the weekly watchings. I caught up to the only shows I follow episode by episode: Bob’s Burgers and The Masked Singer. Both are funny and easy viewing, but in VERY different ways. I’ve been watching Bob’s Burgers for years (I think I started in season 3?) and The Masked Singer feels like eating a pint of ice cream in one sitting (really fun, kind of embarrassing, but you’re an adult who can make their own decision, damn it!).
Following that up with an equally crazy guilty pleasure-esque show. I watched the entirety of season 3 of Riverdale in three days. In 22 episodes, the writers managed to shoehorn in a gang war plot, an anti-Dungeons & Dragons plot, a Breakfast Club-themed episode, a crime noir, a mafia family plot (The Lodge family), a religious-type cult, a serial killer plot, Veronica opening and operating a speakeasy, human dissection, a quarantine, a drug war, Archie in prison, the prison warden forcing Archie to fight in an underground Fight Club ring, and a Heathers musical episode. There were 5 separate occasions while watching this season where everything felt like it was wrapping up, and I thought to myself “Okay, this has to be the season finale, right?” and then I’d check the episode list and I’d only be on episode 8.
So it’s no wonder I decided to pair that with watching the entire The Mind, Explained special on Netflix. As you may know, I’m pretty into the Explained series. I’ve seen the entire first season (haven’t started season 2 yet since I wanted to wait for all of the episodes to be available, but likely will this week), I watched all of Sex, Explained, including the childbirth episode that still gives my nightmares. Overall, I enjoyed it. I don’t think it was as strong as the regular series, and wasn’t as interesting to me personally as the special on sex, but it was still pretty fascinating when you’re talking about the concept of implantable memories and whatnot.
On the movie front, I was assigned to watch Dr. Strangelove (or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb) (1964) for my Apocalypse class. Yes, I am taking an Apocalypse class during this pandemic. No, none of my assignments were canceled for being a primary source to the COVID-19 outbreak, though she did shorten our final paper from 15-20 pages to 10 pages. For an old movie, it was still pretty funny. It’s a black comedy about an air force general who suffers a psychiatric break and orders his crew to drop atomic bombs on Russia (note: this is during the Cold War) while everyone else in the American government has to work through bureaucratic measures to try and call the order off. Clearly, our federal government hasn’t changed at all.
Lastly, my mom mentioned to me a few weeks back that the scariest movie she had ever seen was Humanoids from the Deep (1980), which she saw as a freshman in high school (sorry for revealing your age to the internet, mom). So, in my quarantine-induced stupor, I decided to seek it out. It’s… interesting. Purely a B-movie, it’s literally about fish who ate genetically modified salmon that caused them to evolve into humanoid creatures, and so they decided to start killing the human men and raping human women.
Yeah.
Very gratuitous, a lot of unnecessary nudity, very campy. Overall, it wasn’t bad, for what it was. I have a lot higher of a bar for scary movies than my mom does, but I still thought it was creepy. The very last scene of the film will be burned into my retinas for the foreseeable future (think of that one scene everyone talks about from Alien (1979), and you’re not that far off).
Unofficial Ratings
Dr. Strangelove
I thought I had seen this movie before, but I think I may have confused it with a different black and white political satire movie from the 1960s, so now I need to figure out which one that one was
Humanoids from the Deep
The remade this movie in 1996, and for the life of me, I have no idea why
The Mind, Explained
The episode on psychedelics was fun
Riverdale: season 3
I sent Sarah probably 1000 texts while watching this and I don’t think any of them made sense since she has never seen this season but I tried my best
Film Student Watchlist 