A few thoughts on Supernatural

To be completely honest, I haven't been missing television at all (although this poor little blog certainly has) in the wake of having given up cable.  I think of all the shows I used to DVR (Supergirl, The Flash, Arrow, Legends of Tomorrow, Black Lightning, iZombie, Legion, Crazy Ex-Girlfriend, Gotham, The Walking Dead, RuPaul's Drag Race, Better Call Saul, Fargo, Last Man on Earth (R.I.P.), Preacher ... and I'm sure there are more but I can't remember them now) and I really don't miss any of them.  Maybe Drag Race and Preacher.  And Legion.

Not even those, really.  Not too much - because I've been plowing through Supernatural as fast as I can at 2-3 episodes a night after Mr. Mouse goes to bed.  In hindsight, I can't believe I didn't start watching it right when it first aired: two years after Buffy ended, surely I needed to get a supernatural show to fill the gap.  I didn't, though, for whatever reason, and I am surely enjoying it now, having just started S5.  It's definitely testosterone-heavy (all the cool girls, be they good or evil, do seem to get killed off) but Jensen Ackles and Jared Padalecki as the brothers Winchester are charming as hell, and there is definitely a subversive sense of humor running through the show's veins.  I can't believe it is the longest running genre television show - just renewed for its fourteenth season!  What that means for me, however, is that I've got a lot of episodes ahead of me and that makes me happy.

A few thoughts on Shutter Island

Leo DiCaprio does a passable Boston accent, I guess, having immersed himself in it for both The Departed and Shutter Island, both Martin Scorsese films.  I haven't seen The Departed  yet but I just watched SI last night.  It's a long movie, and I confess to nodding off every now and again - perhaps I shouldn't have started it so late - but as psychological horror flicks go, it holds its own.

The movie takes place in the 1950s.  DiCaprio is Teddy Daniels, a federal marshal, sent out to Shutter Island, an inescapable island facility for the criminally insane, off the coast of Boston.  A new partner (Mark Ruffalo) goes with him as they've been tasked to find out how an inmate, a woman who drowned her three children, could have disappeared from her locked room.  There is literally no way she could have escaped and yet she is gone.  Things get weirder and more intense as Daniels starts to learn about government conspiracies and illegal human experimentation, and starts having flashbacks to his time in the army, liberating Dachau in WWII. 

I'm not a huge DiCaprio fan but he does a great job here, arcing from capable to defensive to slowly unraveling.  I guessed the twist in general terms but the movie stayed interesting and makes me want to read the Dennis Lehane book from which it was adapted.