#being elmo

Gone Girl

God, this movie is good. I’ll let the fact that I had no idea who to trust for half the film speak for itself.

Rating: 5

The Girl on the Train

Rating: 4

Being Elmo: A Puppeteer’s Journey

Ignoring whatever controversies surround Kevin Clash since this documentaries release, this is a beautiful film.

Rating: 3

American Horror Story: 1984

Hello, Tumblrs! Apologies for the radio silence; I'd love to say I've been off doing lots of exciting things, but I haven't. A friend came to stay for a weekend (Prime Netflix time) and I bought a Nintendo 3DS with my ill-gotten Camden Fringe money. I also had a fairly terrible gig aboard a boat last night, which prompted one audience member to take to Twitter to describe both myself and Simon as 'so incredibly awful'. I'll pop that on the Edinburgh posters.

I did watch some things though, such as Being Elmo, the documentary about the career of Kevin 'Elmo' Clash. It's a really heartwarming documentary about someone who had a dream and went for it. It was made before his sexual assault charges were brought and dropped, and I was left in two minds - part of me doesn't want this seemingly kind man to have committed such crimes; the other part of me sort of hopes he did - Clash is unlikely to ever work again on Sesame Street due to the way in which he was acquitted, and if he's innocent it makes for a tragic end to his story (Obviously I mainly hope nobody else was harmed though).

On a tangential note, I then watched one of the Disney Parks programmes on Netflix. Never having been to Disneyland and probably never likely to, I was interested to see within the Magic Kingdom. Unfortunately, what I mainly saw was talking heads - ride designers, that sort of thing. Not a great way to spend 50 minutes.

Still on a Disney bent (in a way), I rewatched Marvel's The Avengers (I watched it on Netflix US, which meant I got the correct title). It's still absolutely the gold standard in superhero films, and in a way anything I could say about it here is a little redundant.

In my final Disney-related viewing for the time being, I watched Hitler's Children, a documentary about the descendants of prominent members of the Nazi party. It was emotive, if a little manipulative; it provided some interesting insights into the men and the families at the heart of some awful events. I was tempted to double bill it with Iron Sky, the space Nazi invasion schlock drama, but I started to worry about what such a thing would do for my Netflix recommendations.

Elsewhere, I watched Trading Places, the Dan Aykroyd/Eddie Murphy 80s comedy. I thought I was going to enjoy it more than I ultimately did, but it was a pleasant enough way to pass a couple of hours; I suspect it had a lot more impact upon its release, when people were less familiar with Murphy's schtick and more familiar with the complexities of the stock exchange.

I've watched quite a few episodes of The IT Crowd after previewing the finale, because there were things in that episode I wasn't sure about, and I didn't want to write my review and then look like some kind of casual IT Crowd viewer (who was once in it). And I watched an episode of Star Trek: Voyager, because it wasn't all bad. It was annoying that the episode ended on a character-changing note for the EMH which was subsequently completely abandoned, but that's the way of things. Tom Paris nearly died at the start of the episode; I really struggled to care.

And finally, I've been watching several more episodes of Warehouse 13, and falling steadily more in love with Allison Scagliotti. I watched an episode of Wil Wheaton's Tabletop in which she was a spy. A board game-playing spy. I had to go for a shower after that one.