PicoBlog

When so much of life is organized around dodging male violence, it’s nice to relax with a movie in which the only source of violence is a woman, and the only target is a man, or many men. It doesn’t matter what he did. He probably had it coming. Rape revenge films sometimes spare us the trauma of the assault, but they never spare us the satisfaction of seeing the assaulters sliced and ruined.

“Breakup” is one of those Abbott Elementary episodes where the whole “schooling” part of the show “about a school” isn’t really the focus. (It almost makes you wonder why a documentary about public school teachers would spend so much time focusing on any of the material provided here. I’m sure the mockumentarian stickler that is my fearless editor, Myles McNutt, has something to say about that.) There are no chime-ins or one-liners from any of the students this week; the most they get in this episode is some screaming and dozing off.

This week’s Abbott Elementary episode makes an interesting choice: despite marking Janine’s official return as a teacher to Abbott, “Double Date” isn’t all too concerned with tackling the adjustment (or re-adjustment) period she might have in coming back. While District Janine still showed up quite regularly on the Abbott campus, we do know just how felt her absence was to both her colleagues and students. (It’s a really nice touch to have Alex be the one to let Janine know he’s happy she’s back, as frustrating as the episode “Alex” was.

“A long time ago…in a galaxy far, far away.” Well, friends, the throat-clearing is at an end. The sixth episode of Ahsoka resolves the question of whether or not a trip from one galaxy to another would lead Sabine Wren to the presumed-dead Ezra Bridger, and whether or not that same trip would reveal that the feared Grand Admiral Thrawn is alive, well, and intent on regaining control. We don’t even have to wait until a cliffhanger-ish ending for each of those questions to be answered in the affirmative, while setting up a completely logical endgame in which Ahsoka has to face off against Thrawn, his Night Troopers, and whatever dark magic (or “magick,” as the closed captioning dubbed it) are offered by the Queen Mothers of Dathomir.

I read Eleanor Catton’s second novel The Luminaries in summer 2019 and really loved it. As a young employee I was kept in the lunchroom thirty minutes past the designated end of my lunch break turning through the final chapters of the book as the narrative reveals its starry conclusion.  The Luminaries is a very MFA novel, and Catton is an Iowa Writer’s Workshop graduate so that totally tracks. Set in 1866 New Zealand at a time when those islands were British territory, Catton writes about her homeland with language that imitates Victorian literature of the time period.

Tracks: 1) Before And After; 2) Why Should I Care; 3) For Lovin’ Me; 4) I’m In Love Again; 5) Little Does She Know; 6) Tell Me Baby; 7) What Do You Want With Me; 8) Say It Isn’t True; 9) Fare Thee Well (I Must Be Gone); 10) Evil-Hearted Me; 11) Can’t Get Used To Losing You. REVIEW On March 27, 1965, Chad & Jeremy signed a contract with Columbia Records, which symbolized their acceptance into the big leagues — apart from Bob Dylan himself, one of Columbia’s leading artists at the time were Simon & Garfunkel, and apparently the idea of propping up their American superstars with a thematically similar British duo really appealed to somebody in the management.

After lightly criticizing all the time spent on the golf course in last week’s overlong “Vertical Drop, Horizontal Tug,” I was pretty wary going into “Disgruntled.” It’s the second episode in a row centered on the country club, and it feels odd to return so quickly, especially without any real carryover of that episode’s conflicts. Mr. Takahashi is back, accusing Larry of various offenses, and it’s just a little repetitive.

Can you believe that Curb is ending next week? I can’t. Aside from some occasional meta references and fun callbacks (or reused storylines, depending how you look at it), this final season hasn’t done much work to help us process the fact that HBO’s longest-running show is coming to an end. Maybe that’s a reflection of Larry David’s generally unsentimental perspective about his projects and his characters, or maybe it’s just a result of this show’s rigid formula.

I’ve always found comedies like Curb Your Enthusiasm more difficult to review than other genres. In many ways, there’s far less to analyze or critique than in other shows I’ve covered for this site, like The White Lotus or Yellowjackets, because it isn’t much interested in character development or serialized plotting in general. So much of the success of an episode hinges on personal taste and humor. It’s like It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia in that way—and I’ve always admired people like Dennis Perkins who can review It’s Always Sunnyon an episodic basis.