[TV] BoJack Horseman: Season 5 Review

If we turned time back a few years and you'd tell me that one of the shows that I would most enjoy watching would involve an anthropomorphic horse with substance abuse problems, I'd think you were crazy. And I still don't fully get what made me take a gamble on BoJack Horseman to begin with. But something happened over the course of the show to real something totally amazing.

The show recently released its fifth season that continues to tell the story of BoJack and the quirky cast of characters around him. And it's a story that largely feels so real, which is a weird description for a show that involves people alongside various anthropomorphic animals of all shapes, sizes and colors.

I thought the show had peaked with the fourth season as the revelations there were pretty heavy-hitting. But of course I was wrong and the world is better for it because there's still a heck of a lot of story in this horse.

[Movies] Set It Up (2018) Review

When it comes to the now "typical" Netflix original movie genres, a lot of their releases are either straight up comedies or romantic comedies. I guess it's because it's more approachable and it theoretically can appeal to a wider audience or at least a wider Netflix audience - I'm making some demographic assumptions here.

Step It Up is romantic comedy movie that hits a lot of familiar notes but also does a lot to try and distance itself from the "traditional" movie of this genre. But at first glance it's hard to tell the difference since you have the fairly nice protagonists focused on other people and not immediately realizing they're possibly meant to be together.

The movie has its share of charm and still follows the general beats of a classic romantic comedy, which is sort of expected in this genre. But even when it tries new things, it still falls back to old habits and feels a little too familiar at times, if you get my drift.

[Books] I'm Not My Father's Son Audible Review

Celebrity memoirs tend to follow a particular pattern. We get some anecdotes from childhood followed by various stories of how they advanced in their respective careers and eventually we get to the part that we're more familiar with in terms of public knowledge. Sometimes the books explore this part of their lives as well. Sometimes they end right before that moment.

Not My Father's Son is a very different book that is striking in its honesty. And not just about being open about his life in general. Instead the book is very focused on a particularly traumatic aspect of his life and how he learned to deal with it over the years.

It's a striking tale and not the sort of candidness that you normally expect from a public figure.

[Movies] Extinction (2018) Review

In our continuing exploration of Netflix's original science fiction and fantasy content after movies like Annihilation, we came across Extinction as one of my primary recommendations one weekend and so the journey continued. And this was yet another experience of jumping into a movie without any knowledge of what it was fully about or what the reviews were like.  Fun times.

The movie certainly felt a lot like Cloverfield in the beginning given how the initial contemporary normalcy was eventually shoved away by a cataclysmic event. But of course the full story of that movie had a bit of a twist at the end, which is something that Extinction shares in terms of the general narrative structure.

Of course the actual plot is significantly different when you get down to the details and has a semi-mystical element given the dreams that plague our protagonist and seem to warn of a danger yet to come. But of course the promotional material including the posters for the movie clearly indicate the future technology angle that also plays a part in the story.

[Theater] M. Butterfly (Frontrow Entertainment) Review

I had long been curious about the Maybank Performing Arts Theater that's essentially just down the street. It isn't that big a venue and yet a number of interesting productions have been booking the venue and I wanted to see why.

We finally got our chance with the Manila staging of M. Butterfly, which is one of those stories that we've all vaguely heard about and yet I've never really sat down to explore and experience. And this is fully knowledgeable of the fact that there's even a David Cronenberg movie out there that I have yet to watch.

So it was generally nice to enter this experience not knowing too much about the story and getting to experience it for the first time. But at the same time it meant not being fully prepared for some of the more creative efforts to bring the story to life.