The Week That Was - March 3, 2025
Mimicking Dylan, Sudbury, Oscars, Good Voight(?), and adapting Elmore Leonard
All was bad in the world, and then we got new Shoresy episodes. Are things still bad? Yeah. But there are still new Shoresy eps.
TV
Shoresy (Season 4) - I had no idea this was coming when it dropped, and within eight hours of finding out we had more Shoresy to watch, it had all been watched. As a fan of both Letterkenny and Shoresy, the heart that Shoresy brings elevates Jared Keeso’s shtick past where Letterkenny was able to reach. And I should note that it took me a while to cotton to the storytelling language of Letterkenny. Hell, Jackie couldn’t really lock in to Letterkenny. Shoresy is a show we both like and was an easy sell to watch the whole six-episode season in a sitting the day it dropped.
Does Shoresy still deliver the unfettered lewdness with élan? Thankfully, yes. Without getting too far into where our titular foul-mouthed character finds himself in Season 4 for fear of spoiling things if you haven’t watched this wonderful show, we find ourselves following the sluts (hockey players, in the parlance of the show, which is probably the parlance of the Senior Whale Shit Hockey World of Northern Ontario) around Sudbury over the course of the summer following the Season 3 denouement. I’m tempted to whine about hockey taking a back seat this season, but as a seasoned vet of the Shoresyverse, I know that a season of Shoresy is spiritually closer to a half-season, as the seasons are short and come every eight to ten months. So really, this is all about getting a glimpse at the lives of the senior hockey guys still sticking around Sudvegas, and it’s still a fun if somewhat aimless [thematically tied in to where our hero finds himself, obviously] run of six episodes. But as with Letterkenny (from whence the character of Shoresy originated), what actually happens in the course of six episodes of the show doesn’t have to matter, and unlike multiple seasons of its progenitor, this does move the “story” forward. The new season is fun as hell, and the first scene at Little Montreal is maybe the highlight, though there’s still plenty of great shit, and the whole Blueberry Buddies arc is fun as hell. Hulu
The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City (Season 5) - We finally watched the last reunion episode. I kind of loathe like 85% of the cast on this. Pretty sure I watch it to get incensed. It’s sure not because they’re interesting. I mean this is a show built around the “housewives” living in a city so unimaginably boring that they have to plan no fewer than three trips for the cast, one of which was to Milwaukee—a city I happen to love and have had a blast in every time I’ve been there in the past 25 years—this season and another was to the similarly non-exciting Palm Springs, a trip that was punctuated by RHOSLC’s most loathsome cast member having a complete meltdown about having to take a return flight (after an initial private charter to get there) in coach on a 65-minute flight in a plane that maybe had eight “first class” seats. There’s so little to engage with in this asinine show, and before you offer that this is because it’s dealing with a bunch of Mormons and ex-Mormons, I direct your attention to The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives. If there is soft-swinging on this stupid show, it’s never mentioned and certainly not talked about openly. Instead, we have these mostly awful women relitigating arguments from four seasons ago. Peacock, Bravo
The 97th Academy Awards - Watched this on Hulu, which was fine for me. Until the livestream kicked everyone off right as Best Actress was getting announced. Way to crap the bed, Hulu. I can’t say I saw everything this year, but I saw a fair chunk of the films nominated. I am happier than I have any business being for Mikey Madison and Sean Baker’s wins for Anora. Sean Baker now has more Oscars than Steven Spielberg. Feels right. Conan was a fun host in my book. It’s a thankless job, but he mostly nailed it. The Karla Sofía Gascón publicist joke was killer. Speaking of Gascón, I’m not sure how much her old tweets did to derail the Emilia Pérez Oscar domination train that left the station at the Golden Globes. I don’t tend to think that the Golden Globes are particularly predictive of Oscar winners, but it was shocking to see Emilia Pérez win much of anything, let alone Best Picture, Musical or Comedy, over Anora. I’d say that I hope that the composition of the Academy has changed enough that Emilia Pérez wouldn’t have beaten, well, any of the other nominees it was up against, but Green Book won Best Picture six years ago, so such hopes that the voting members of the Academy wouldn’t have bought into the Netflix hype machine selling a terrible film to them because it had a trans actress in it despite its numerous massive issues had there not been major controversy surrounding it are probably misplaced. Hulu?
Film
A Complete Unknown (2024) - I should probably preface this by saying I’m a fairly big Dylan fan. I’m not a freak or anything, but I’ve seen multiple docs, have downloaded 24 albums, own physical copies of at least seven LPs and another few CDs, and could probably list a few more things that would qualify me as a Bob Dylan Guy. As far as this “Bob Dylan Guy” goes, it should go without saying that I saw No Direction Home, Martin Scorsese’s 2005 documentary totaling 208 minutes of runtime, which is six minutes longer than The Brutalist, and the runtime doesn’t include an intermission. While this is adapted from Elijah Wald’s 2015 book Dylan Goes Electric! Dylan, Seeger, Newport, and the Night that Split the Sixties, Scorsese’s No Direction Home essentially covers this stretch of Dylan’s career and does it with footage of the genuine article doing it.
The punk-rock moment of Dylan telling the machine that helped make him to go screw after they wanted him to keep folky isn’t lost on me. Neither is Timothée Chalamet’s performance and the difficulty of learning to play and sing a huge chunk of Dylan’s catalog. But Dylan lived a full life, and apparently the only film in there is this moment in time. I mean they show him take off on a motorcycle at the end of the film. No motorcycle wreck? No Dylan and Johnny Cash cutting an album’s worth of material that Columbia scrapped because they were hammered? Ultimately, we see an entire film that just builds up to Dylan telling the folk machine to go screw. Okay. It hits the beats it’s supposed to, but it just felt like there wasn’t enough to invest in or care about, so you are just left watching Chalamet’s impressive Dylan impersonation. VOD
Coming Home (1978) - I’ve seen a lot of Jon Voight. I don’t remember seeing him in a film or TV show where I liked him. He’s really good here, he’s not doing some dumb accent or obvious shtick, and I think he probably deserved the Oscar he won for this, which I’m shocked about. Jane Fonda is routinely great, so her Oscar win for this makes tons of sense. I’d always sort of meant to see this, mostly because of Fonda and Hal Ashby directing. It’s not the best Ashby by any means, but it’s a solid watch. Streamed extralegally
Easy A (2010) - This is the first movie that got its mitts on Emma Stone and realized it could get by primarily on her charms. I’ve seen this a bunch and throw it on like once a year when I don’t want to think about selecting a movie to watch. Stone’s charming, Patricia Clarkson and Stanley Tucci are fun as her parents, I like that it’s set in Ojai, and there’s something refreshing about how little Penn Badgley’s Woodchuck Todd doesn’t care about what anyone else says about Olive as he pops in and out of the film. It’s not earth-shattering, but it’s oddly comforting. Hulu
Get Shorty (1995) - It’d been so long that I’d honestly forgotten Gene Hackman—RIP to a helluva actor—was in this. When this came out, it was commonly referred to as the first time an adaptation of Elmore Leonard’s work was done adequately, really getting the tone. With filmmakers like Steven Soderbergh and Quentin Tarantino doing it better over the couple of years that followed, it now seems quaint to think this was so well regarded. It’s not bad, but Get Shorty doesn’t nail Leonard like those that followed like Soderbergh, Tarantino, Graham Yost, or even the Get Shorty series did after. Prime