Watching - April 2024

Flat Pack Pop: Sweden's Music Miracle (2019)

A brief look at the history of Denniz Pop and Cheiron Studios, and their influence in the last couple of decades. Like the more detailed look in The Song Machine, it has a tendency to overstate how dominant their productions were (yes, I know Max Martin is ridiculously successful but there's still 95% of the chart that isn't made by him) but in a one hour documentary I suppose some corners have to be cut. Interesting but could really do with being a series - and by reducing Max Martin's subsequent success to the last ten minutes, it missed a significant part of the real story, to my mind.

Twins (1989)

Apparently, because Schwarzenegger and Devito took a slice of the profits, this ended up being one of their biggest paychecks - it was a big hit. Looking back now, it's a little hard to understand why: it's a pleasant enough film, with some mildly amusing moments. I hadn't seen it in literally decades and it was kind of fun to see it again.

Free Guy (2021)

I've watched this several times and I'd watch it again, mainly for Ryan Reynolds. This time, let's focus on Hollywood's ludicrous portrayal of "l33t hax0r skillz" - myriad windows popping up all over the place, fancy code visualisation graphics, a few taps on the keyboard to completely reprogram a game and then, just to really cap it all, a DOS prompt. FFS. (fwiw, a real programmer has open: one IDE, one Linux terminal, and multiple Stack Overflow tabs)

What If? (2023-)

I've been watching this channel for a few months now, and it's an on-going thing (videos are released at varying intervals), but I had to give it a mention. Each video is a few minutes long, and takes a question from xkcd's What If? archives and animates it, with a voice-over from Randall himself. Yes, they're just replays of what you could read online but they're sweet little videos. Worth a watch.

Brooklyn Nine-Nine (Season 1, 2013)

Despite having watched this about two years ago, I only remembered about half of it, which is odd, because it's very funny. Maybe that says more about me ... anyway, I wanted something to watch that's enjoyable and not too demanding, and I've never got past this first season. So here goes!