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⭐9/10 This movie right here is the kind that reminds you why you love cinema. In the two hours it takes you to watch it, you will experience wonder and awe and dread and profound sadness and hope. It's perhaps not a perfect movie, but it is a story that grabs you and doesn't let go until you're left reeling at the end, silent as you watch the credits, ready to immediately go back to the start and see how all the pieces fit.  This is a French movie by Denis Villeneuve and kinda feels like what Momento was for Christopher Nolan - an earlier, less grand movie that is tight and driven by mystery and compelling characters. It's about two siblings being left a mysterious will by their mother, her final wish being one that takes them across the vague Middle-east (most of the places are fictional to avoid political commentary) to discover her past. They have mixed feelings about their odd, eccentric mother, but as you learn about her story you quickly start to under...

⭐9/10 Starting our watch of my new favorite show in earnest, though we skipped a few seasons to start because we've heard first few are a little rough.  This show and this season are absolutely awesome. It takes place in Patagonia, and I actually had a bit of familiarity with survival tactics in this area because I read The Wager which is a survival story that takes place there. It's a beautiful, harsh location, and one of the best features of this show is that it's nice to look at.  We get a terrific cast of characters from nature hippies to mountain men, each one having their own strengths and weaknesses. I love the contrast that we get every season, especially in age, where young people have more energy and can recover better, but don't have that experience or knowledge that the vets have. This is a American show with American contestants, but I do wish there were a few people from different cultures who might bring something different. One of the most st...

⭐7/10 This was my latest foray into the movies with Willy and Corney, and these are always super hit or miss. I went in with low expectations and was pleasantly surprised. It's your typical kids sports underdog story - like truly, there are zero surprises - but it's got a few good gags and the animation is gorgeous.  I love this trend in animation. This is Spiderverse inspired and works great for this movie. It's super stylish and one of my favorite representations of basketball. It's got a lot of swag and actually looks like it was made by people who either play or actually know what basketball looks like. In a lot of ways this is a love letter to the new generation of basketball lovers, having a uniquely modern feel. It's a bit of a double edged sword because I am indeed not the new generation and romanticize the old school, but I'm glad kids have a movie that is distinctly for them. I wonder if all the slang and trends will look silly in ten years...

⭐10/10 Is this a comedy masterpiece? I was really not familiar with this comedy duo outside of their viral Wii Shop Wednesday sketch, but praise for this movie was high and we actually made it out to the cinema like this was 2008. Man, what an absolute hoot to watch in the theatres. From the opening scene this movie killed me and I was laughing so hard in the theatre that I was honestly embarrassed. This movie is a miracle.  They have a pretty unique style in that this is often unscripted interactions with the people of Toronto. That's right -- Toronto! -- this movie is also very Canadian. It's a bit like Nathan Fielder in that way, though it blends scripted moments with it as well. In fact, I daresay Matt and Jay are something of a combination of my favorites - Fielder, Tim Robinson, as well as Flight of the Concords or even a little old school Rhett and Link. The whole premise is that they are a struggling band trying to get booked to play the Rivoli, a very modes...

⭐9/10 This was our choice for Valentine's this year. In a way it was kinda a tough movie for the occasion - it asks some questions I'm not sure I want to think about. But by the end I was completely sold and really liked this as a unique, creative romance.  In this one we meet a couple who have had a nice, plain marriage for decades, and then when they both die they meet up in the afterlife except there's a problem - she had a first husband and the two of them had a passionate, shortlived marriage when they were young and hot and before he died as a soldier. Now she has to choose which man she spends eternity with - the plain but safe guy she was married to for decades, or the earnest heartthrob whose love was unrealized. It's a cool premise right? I mean, the details aren't super important and you can't think too hard about the details, but it really explores this question in a meaningful, emotionally resonant way, especially because choosing one me...

⭐ 9.5/10 This is a show that I hear about almost every week from one of my favourite podcasts because they have loved it from day one. I heard it described as Succession + Euphoria, and while I love Succession I haven't seen Euphoria because it looks like sex and drugs and no real substance. Well this show certainly has that, but a whole lot of substance as well. I started the first season over a year ago, and it took a while to get through that season, but at some point it finds its rhythm and I could not stop watching. I didn't even have time to review previous seasons because I was burning through them, and it all felt like one big story. Season 3 has a huge ending, and is clearly the closing of a chapter for the show, so before I start 4 I figured I should reflect. Season 1 is about a bunch of new grads starting what is basically an internship at Pierpoint, a massive financial institution in London. If they do a good job and pass the final interview they will secure full t...

⭐ 9/10 This game was $3, and the number of runs I have done the overall cost was probably like a penny a run. This is a roguelike deck builder that is super simple to understand, but every single run you peel back a layer of complexity. I would never say roguelikes are my favourite style of game, and a main issue I have with this game is the huge lack of persistent rewards. But that is also what makes this fun - when you win it feels like skill and understanding, not just getting by because you have grinded to level up base stats or something. I can only compare it to other games like this, and Hades was my most recent. In that one the persistent rewards and stats are huge, so much so that I don't think you really need to change your playstyle throughout. You start to recognize patterns since that game is based on reaction, but in this one the only way to get better is to be smarter. I loved how I would have a run where I would get some terrible card or relic, but then I would bui...

⭐9/10 I randomly came across this show while flipping around on my TV and instantly knew I had hit a goldmine. I had heard of this show, but I guess I figured it was some hacky network reality series that I'd have no interest in and didn't give it a second thought. Silly me! I have been in love with all things survival since I'd read Hatchet as a kid, and this show was made for me specifically as it is basically Hatchet: the Series.  It's a show where contestants are dropped into the remote wilderness with 10 items and are forced to survive off the land there for a specified amount of time. All the footage is recorded by contestants and the items they bring are limited, and so it really is something of a simulation of living in pre-civilized society. This is actually a spinoff season where all the contestants are series veterans, and are dropped into the Canadian Arctic just before winter hits.  I loved every second of this show. There were a few glaring fla...

    I've started the new year strong with lots of 4 and 5-star reads, but not counting rereads, these were the ones that stood out as new favourites!      This was as good as I expected it to be after reading two Juliet Marillier books last year, then deciding to go back to the beginning of her most popular series, first published in 1999. It's a fairy tale retelling, and has this lush, meandering, detailed, atmospheric feel that I adored, even though a lot of those things are not usually my thing. It's also very long, but just like the other Marillier books I've read, it doesn't feel like long and deserves the page count.      Sorcha begins the book as a young girl in medieval-ish Ireland. She's the youngest in her family with six older brothers and a distant father who is always away defending his territory from the Britons. Her idyllic childhood ends when she uses her healing skills to help a young Briton soldier, and again when her father rema...

⭐8/10 What started as a nostalgia trip has quickly developed into an obsession. These games are good! They are fun to play! I don't want to stop!  I am now getting into true nostalgia territory as this is a game a beat a hundred times as a kid and still knew inside and out today. It is an improvement on the first entry in essentially every single way, now introducing a bunch of mechanics that would last the rest of the series. There are a million quality of life changes, such as ways to avoid random encounters or the ability to run from them if not. They also make each online space unique and interesting to explore, and there are plenty of balance changes so that progression feels more linear and fair.  I'll start out with the negatives. The first negative is that the story is way more involved. This is a negative because the story still sucks, and now there is more of it. The story in this game is just the annoying thing that happens between boss fights, and so no...

⭐6/10 Had a tough time with this one. It should be the perfect show for me because it's about therapists and broken people and healing from loss and all, and initially I was completely sold! That opening scene killed me and I was fully on board, and that feeling lasted a few episodes.  By the end, I was just waiting for this show to be done. The one trend in modern TV that I despise is constant therapy talk, characters sitting across from each other and pouring out their hearts, revealing their past traumas by just talking about it. The therapist in me thinks that communication is awesome and they key to healing, but the TV watcher in me thinks that this makes for very uninteresting viewing. My rule of thumb is that in stories, characters should not apologize by simply issuing an apology. I mean it comes down to the basics of writing: I want to be shown that someone is sorry, not be told. There are like thirty apologies per episode and it drives me nuts. I get that ther...

⭐10/10 I've had this movie in the back of my mind since Tim reviewed it, and like him, it was a movie I hadn't seen since it came out but one I loved then and was confident I'd love now. I watched this with a group of guys telling them that this is kinda the best movie of this variety, and by that I mean an action/thriller with government special ops and secret missions and whatever.  I think I was pretty much right. I had a few small quibbles here and there, but otherwise I think this movie is perfect. It's grounded and tight, it's led by performances by some of my favorite actors, the writing is absolutely fantastic, and like all of Villeneuve's movies, there is always something interesting to look at.  The thing that sets this movie apart is allowing for a truly difficult ethical dilemma. They are trying to find a Mexican drug lord, and Del Toro says "to find him would be like discovering a vaccine -- surely you understand the value of that....