The Week That Was - July 7, 2025
Finishing up Andor, giving Rogue One another chance, a brutal Netflix sequel, and more
This week, we had some family functions that slowed some of my media input at the back end of this week and will definitely curb much of my viewing time in the coming week, so there may not be an entry in this series next Monday, just to steel you for that potentiality.
TV
Andor (Season 2) - I was extremely hesitant to start this series, despite the praises sung of it by many people I know, because I simply do not care about the Star Wars universe on the whole. It’s long since overstayed its welcome for me, and the saturation of this universe is irritating to me. That said, Andor was great. I touched on this last week, but this really is the antifascist thing we need right now. The first few episodes, which I presume were shot prior to the multiple strikes that likely messed with the Season 2 production schedule, were a little slow, much like the first season was at times. After the third episode or so, that was no longer the case, as the creative team decided they were going to tell four seasons worth of plotted out episodes in 12 total eps. That meant things came at a breakneck pace in this, its final season. Some stuff may have been rushed, but I thought the second season played very well and it actually made me want to give Rogue One another chance.
Film
Sex-Positive (2024) - Never have so many attractive people and the City of New Orleans looked so bad. This sex romp was abysmal. The tone was grating. The performances were all over the place. The cinematography and color grading were some of the worst I’ve ever seen. I can’t urge you strongly enough to stay away from this movie. So bad. Starz, Plex
The Settlers (2023) - Effectively released in 2024 for filmgoers, this was a beautifully shot film, set in South America (Chile and Argentina, specifically) around the turn of the 20th Century when the elite European settlers were carving up a continent for themselves without regard for the indigenous people who lived on that land, viewing them as savages lucky to be graced with whatever scraps they were thrown and deserving of slaughter if the European elites deemed it necessary. This shows the barbarism of settler colonialism at its most unabashed, and the chilling denouement explores the levels to which those calling for and carrying out the slaughter will dig to rationalize and compartmentalize their heinous actions. This film is so relevant to today. It’s not an easy watch. It shouldn’t be. Powerful stuff. Mubi
Intermission (2003) - John Crowley (Brooklyn, We Live in Time, The Goldfinch) brought this Mark O’Rowe script to life, and it felt like the script and film were pretty pleased with how clever and fun it was making this crime caper dark comedy be. Unfortunately, this was neither clever nor fun. More importantly, though, it wasted a cast that included Colin Farrell, Cillian Murphy, Kelly Macdonald, Colm Meaney, Shirley Henderson, and Kerry Condon. That cast needed something better to do than this, and they could have looked a lot better doing it because this film looked like shit. This felt like it was at the tail end of the Tarantino imitators, just set in Ireland, and with a farkakte love story angle that doesn’t simply not work but borders on misogynistic for how stupid it makes everyone look. Such a waste. Mubi
Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016) - I went into this rewatch expecting to like it considerably more than I did the first time. Instead, I was once again bored to tears. The film gives us an uninteresting heroine who is dragged along on the ride for the first half of the film, and then after failing to draw her in a way that should have left us caring about her in any way, she’s thrust at least a little more into being mission critical, but that mission is muddied with like 20 minutes of jumbled space battle footage that confuses and bores more than it enthralls or meaningfully forwards the story. There’s so much boring space battle nonsense that my eyes glossed over and I lost interest enough to fall asleep. I went back and rewatched the last half of the film a second time to watch it in total, and it just doesn’t work. Andor works great. This does little past introducing a great character who we get just a relative glimpse of in the form of Cassian Andor. Everything else dies on the vine. Maybe this is the difference between Tony Gilroy’s less adulterated vision in Andor where he was the showrunner versus his being one of four credited writers on this Frankensteined movie that made the very bad choice of using digital recreations of Peter Cushing and Carrie Fisher that made you feel like you were watching a video game character interact with real people. Disney+
The Old Guard 2 (2025) - I didn’t LOVE the first one, but it was at least palatable. This sequel seems like it couldn’t have been written by a human being. So much awful exposition. The fight sequences are flat. I tend to be hard on Netflix productions, but this earned my ire. It’s absymal. Avoid. Avoid. Avoid. I don’t even think it’d be good for a hate-watch. Netflix
The Seat (2025) - This is a 45-minute doc on Mercedes’ F1 team signing 17-year-old phenom to take the seat that Lewis Hamilton vacated last year. I don’t know how much I learned here. It’s fine. If you are an F1 fan—BIG UPS TO NICO HÜLKENBERG!—there are worse ways to spend less than an hour, if for no other reason than to wonder if multiple documentary film crews had to duke it out to talk to Toto Wolff every day. Netflix