BlackberryJam

The editing of the 3 day long fight scene with Paulie was terrible. One actor would strike a pose while awaiting the move from the other. Ugh. Had it been edited better, it wouldn’t have felt so choreographed. I also still don’t care about Teresa. I mean, how many people died for this personality-free and interest-free rando?

Tropes are for the fanfiction I read. Take two characters I already love and put them in a faking dating, single bed situation and I AM DOWN for that. The tropes aren’t fun unless I care about the characters first. I particularly like book series because the characters do get developed. Or should get developed. Not gonna lie, I read some books just to have something to read that doesn’t require much mental effort. And allows me to escape reality for a while. Right now, I’m reading the latest Tessa Wegert book in the Shana Merchant series. They are…fine. I guess. Too much serial killer nonsense, but they don’t require me to think or care too much. I can read the book, let it take up my time and then forget it later.

She definitely milked the family for more books than they were worth. However, I miss the days of curling up with a good romance novel and losing myself. I feel like the book market, at least what gets advertised to me, is over saturated with women-in-peril and domestic thrillers. I am sick of women-in-peril stories.

I don’t care about Teresa. I have never cared about Teresa. I never will care about Teresa. Every time someone says Teresa all I hear is McGuffin.

@LBC Me I took Russian/Soviet Lit in college. It took me decades to shake off that gloom. Sofia Petrovna is a novella and sort of the female version of Ivan Denisovich. @scarynikki12Sing it. I mean, all those novels have problematic elements, but I could never like James. I also felt like Lindsay liked him far too much. Ugh. It's been a long time since I read those books, but it seems to be time to revisit.

@grommit2 I enjoyed The Women as well. @GHScorpiosRule I also loved the Malory books. Except James. James was a dick. Don’t rename women with male names because you think it’s cute, asshole. James can fuck right off. I was always team Anthony. And YES to a young Pierce Brosnan. I recently finished The Briar Club which had an interesting twist. I can’t decide if the twist added to the book or didn’t. I enjoyed the multiple POVs. Also just finished The Goddess of Warsaw and I’m struggling to describe why it left me cold. If it had just been a revenge story, I would have liked it better, or if it had just been about the main character’s time in the Warsaw Ghetto during WW2. But… The book also skipped pretty much from 1950s to the early 2000s where we got …nothing. Just nothing. I feel like an interesting story left me uninterested. Anyone else? In other fun news, I thoroughly enjoyed Kills Well With Others the sequel to Killers of a Certain Age. Give me a team of female assassins in their 60s and I’m down. I have the latest Finlay Donovan queued up and I’m hoping for a third in the Suburban Dicks series. But I really need some lightness, so the Malory books might be on tap. Except James. He’s a dick. ;)

Sounds completely skippable. Voit is so trite and boring.

So my guess is:

So was that Serena during the halftime show? Some sites are saying yes.

Drake had a very weird “friendship” with Millie Bobby Brown when she was 13.

Every sport is in it to make money. Without the ad money, they can’t pay the players. So I’m fine with the ads. I mean, I might change the channel or fastforward, but I’m not going to complain that the ads exist. I might complain about their quality though. So…did someone resurrect Drake after the Grammy’s so he can get re-murdered?

I haven’t stepped in a Hobby Lobby in a decade, for good reason. Give me all the Caitlin Clark! Are we really getting health care ads celebrating the execs?

So…I’m joining late. What is the design on the Super Bow logo? The Glen Powelll truck ad is silly and not good.

The use of DM in that ad pained me. Also…I’ve decided to root for the Eagles, because why not?

I don’t think our heroes are turning into monsters. I think monsters are very good at pretending to be heroes.

You might be my spirit animal. I don't mind the Chiefs, but I'd like to see someone else win this year. The Commanders as an FU to Dan Snyder, the Eagles because why not and the Bills to finally screw over the Cigarette Smoking Man.

I still despise Tony Romo. Can someone shove a sock in his mouth?

He also dressed Melissa McCarthy. Not my favorite, but she clearly loved it and it's very flattering and provided her the coverage that makes her comfortable. She looks good. She looks happy. I would have gone full mob-wife hair though. And Jessica Gunning. Again, not my favorite look of the night, but the color is gorgeous. It does look like she has a giant scrunchie around her shoulders, but it frames her face beautifully. Like Melissa, she looked happy, comfortable and confident. You can put someone in a beautiful dress, but if they don't feel comfortable or good about themselves, you can tell. Christian has a reputation for creating great outfits for those of non-standard size.

Paige is soulful? What? A Russian soul? Seriously. WTF? Talk about a bad take. Paige's behavior is clearly shown to be very American entitled teen. In S1, she wants more leg warmers even though she has 37 pair. She's constantly all up in her feelings when we see young Elizabeth and young Philip just trying to survive, taking care of their sick mother (Elizabeth), suffering beatings and bullying (Philip) and both with serious food insecurity. And Paige thinks her life is the worst ever. I mean, I absolutely agree that Elizabeth and Philip are psychologically damaging their children. The lies, the fakeness of their marriage, the parentification of Paige, and the fact that they are never there. So much bad parenting. But, we hear from Reuben in Divestment about how he beats his children. There are different standards and expectations for parenting around the world and it's always evolving. Paige's expectations of parenting from Philip and Elizabeth are completely and utterly American. I am glad I wasn't participating in fandom back then and hearing that nonsense. How could the showrunners NOT think people would get a creeper vibe from the relationship of an adult male and a teen girl? I mean, come on. They have Philip scrambling and doing everything he can to not have sex with Kimmy because the relationship between an adult male and a teen girl is weird and skeevy. [I'm thinking about Millie Bobby Brown and Drake right now.] There is a scene in the Ethiopia episode where Paige goes to the church and meets with Alice. She and Alice hug as Paige is clearly upset. Alice ends up breaking down and crying Paige's arms and the look on Paige's face is like, "WTF, WHY IS SHE EXPECTING ME TO COMFORT HER, I'M JUST A CONFUSED TEEN AND IT SHOULD ALL BE ABOUT ME!" I'm not sure Alice, at the time they left, saw Paige as any sort of rival for Tim's affections, but college-age sexually-active Paige would certainly be different. @ZellaNow all I can see in Paige's face is her eyebrows!!! I have watched some Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys interviews from back in the day. I love his accent and I love the way they interact. So much amazing on-screen chemistry that did not fall off when they became a real life couple.

I like Christian and I'm happy for his success. However, none of this looks remarkable to me. The end table is interesting, but no one is going to sit on that brown bench seat. I paint (abstract, and only for my home) and the stuff on the walls looks like it comes from At Home. There is absolutely nothing wrong with art from At Home. I have a great metal sculpture from there. But I'm sure Christian's collection has a much higher price point. This looks like the living room of someone who did a sad beige nursery.

@sistermagpieHeh! I got the year from The Americans wiki. I acknowledge my wrongness and bow to your superior information!! :) RE: Holly Taylor. It is absolutely a testament to the writing and the acting of KR and MR that this show is so awesome despite how bad HT is. @sistermagpieis right, Paige spends her off screen time in a prop closet. There is nothing going on behind the words she’s saying. @Zella We see so little of Arkady yet Lev Gorn makes him a real character. I know Arkady is busy off screen. He has a full life. I think Kelly AuCoin did a good job being Pastor Tim, but …the character always felt too close to a creeper. Initially, I thought Tim might be grooming Paige. I think there is a line Elizabeth says at one point to Paige about how Paster Tim and Alice love her, and I remember thinking, “Why? Why would two adults love a random teenage girl? And why charmless, annoying Paige?” It felt weird. Paige wasn’t doing anything to endear herself to those adults. At least HT wasn’t conveying that she did. Paige got involved with the Reed Street Church based on the girl she met on the bus to Aunt Helen’s. I initially thought that girl (Kelly) was someone from the Centre, keeping an eye on Paige, and starting the recruitment process. But we never see Kelly again. So…the church, the protests, etc. I don’t know if there are any liberal churches anymore. At least locally, I don’t know of any. The church led protests I see are Westboro Baptist and the less said about that “church” the better. I do remember my middle school and high school years, things like Hands Across America, listing to the song “Sun City” even though it was hard to find, and…the song “Russians” by Sting. I know that song is sappy and a bit too on point, but I really, really wanted the show to have used it somewhere, at least the music if not the lyrics. As I type this, I’m recognizing that part of my love of this show is nostalgia, and my naïveté about changing the world. Ah…to be that young, innocent and hopeful again. Hans. Imperfect but dedicated newbie, yes. I think about Paige walking down the street and doing the surveillance in S6 and was like, Hans was so much better. The US was definitely on the wrong side regarding South Africa. The show used so many great Peter Gabriel songs, but I wanted the beat of “Biko”. (Again, nostalgia.)

So….I never connected with Virtue and Moir. I never saw the supposed chemistry. It always felt like high school play quality acting. But I acknowledge their skill. I thought the Moulin Rouge routine was technically great, but emotionally hilariously bad. I never “got” Pasha Grishuk, and that routine where she skidded her toe pick and there was no penalty? Ugh. And there was all that drama with Usova/Zhulin and Grishuk/Platov. Is there a documentary or fictionalized account of all that? There should be. I loved the Duchesnays.

I had drafted a very long response but somehow never posted it and it got lost in the ether. DRAT. So I'm trying to recreate. MR also dances in the pilot, while at the mall, totally humiliating Paige. It so reminded me of my own dad who used to sing and dance in public all the time. Paige was born in '68 and I was born in '70, so I was experiencing the world through the same aged lens. Which is why I find Holly Taylor just...not good. Anyway, I think joy is harder to convey than tragedy, which is why either MR was having a great time dancing or he's a better actor than I thought. I think those hardliners never truly went away. I mean, look at Russia now. I remember "Mr. Gorbachev, tear down that wall," even though I was never a Reagan fan. That was a moment, but it was also full of so much uncertainty. Could the Soviets be trusted? Should they be? Philip and Elizabeth had worked in the shadows to win the Cold War, when in the end, it just sort of fizzled away. Does that make them heroes? Or soldiers having committed atrocities in a war that never had a winner? Would they be celebrated? Shunted away to make way for a new way of looking at things? Arkady didn't even trust his own agents. I know thinking post-canon is just an exercise in frustration, but I've always been one to do it. I know Paige was supposed to be a college student at the end, but I struggled seeing her older than 17. As a character, she never matured for me. I get what you're saying about living as her authentic self as her ending. I just struggled so hard with the character. She never had an authentic self for me. Henry. I generally enjoyed Henry, but the final scene of him sitting in the bleachers with Stan involved some serious terrible acting on Keidrich Sellati's part. I didn't buy that Stan had just told him that his parents were Russian spies who fled the country without him. His reaction read more like, "Oh no, one of my five hamsters ran way, how could it do that to me?" YES. I could feel the devastation. And his scene with Oleg's wife. Both of them, it's just a gut punch. So much better than Stan's scene with Henry. I've been mulling over Hans and the anti-apartheid movement as well as Soviet-Afghan War. So much political legacy that makes this show all the more fascinating.

There are a lot of TV cop shows with male detectives who only mention their children once or twice a season and are never seen with them, so I'm not sure it should be different for Tosh.

So...still rewatching episodes. Philip's sex with Kimmy is some of the least sexy sex that ever sexed. He looks completely miserable. The scene in the show where Philip is happiest is the line dancing bit at the beginning of S6. Matthew Rhys moves well. You can see he was just having a great time in that one. And compared to Elizabeth, he just looks so relaxed and healthy. MR and KR are so damn good in those roles. I am repeatedly just floored by how well music was used in this show, and I love the fact that the music rights were paid all the way through syndication (I'm looking at YOU, Northern Exposure, but I suppose Joshua Brand learned his lesson.) The finale episode with Dire Straits, U2 and then Tchaikovsky is just perfect. There is an scene in season 5 when Elizabeth and Philip are fighting over training Paige and she says to him, something like, "I'm going ahead with this, with or without you." And on rewatch, that "With Or Without You" just so stood out, knowing how Paige walked away to that song. In fact, I can't hear "Goodbye Yellow Brick Road" without thinking about Elizabeth looking at her shoes. I also appreciate Igor Burov so much more on rewatch. Boris Krutonog does so much with his face in his final scene, looking at Oleg's wife and the baby. I have tried to process the evidence of espionage when it comes to Oleg. All they have him doing is picking up a coded message. They have zero proof about what the message says. And if it says, "Hey Oleg, tell your people that some of our people are after Gorbachev," then I don't know how that leads to an espionage conviction. That's not classified information about the US or US national defense. A key element of the crime is specific intent to harm the United States. I think the FBI has a bunch of speculation about Burov but no actual proof that that he did anything. So in my head, after 8 months or so of the US attorney dicking around and trying to put pressure on him, Oleg is released and deported. Of course, what is he going back to? I mean, what did Philip and Elizabeth return to? Arkady, in sending Oleg, was acting outside Directorate S, because he was unsure of who he could trust in his own organization. How much cover did he have? The plot against Gorbachev obviously failed, but it's not like the old guard and the Claudias just vanished. Elizabeth killed Tatiana and foiled that assassination attempt and she told Claudia that. Of course, it likely didn't make any official report. Speaking of post-canon, I've often thought that Paige ended up running to Pastor Tim. She has the passport and money. Why go back to the apartment? I'm not sure why I have this show on repeat right now, except that it is engaging and satisfying, while also being comforting.