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First Viewing Viewing Date: March 27th Via: iTunes Store Plot: A young boy and his grandmother have a run-in with a coven of witches and their leader. Rating: 7.0/10

First Viewing Viewing Date: March 27th Via: Netflix Plot: Two best friends embark on a cross-country road trip to New York City in pursuit of a childhood crush. Rating: 6.5/10

First Viewing Viewing Date: March 26th Via: Stan. Plot: Mortal hero Bek teams with the god Horus in an alliance against Set, the merciless god of darkness, who has usurped Egypt's throne, plunging the once peaceful and prosperous empire into chaos and conflict. Rating: 4.2/10

First Viewing Viewing Date: March 26th Via: iTunes Store Plot: A retired hitman is hunted by a younger clone of himself. Rating: 6.4/10

First Viewing Viewing Date: March 25th Via: Cinema Plot: When Godzilla mysteriously begins to attack humanity resulting in mass damage and fatalities, the only hope for humankind is the mighty Kong. Rating: 8.3/10

First Viewing Viewing Date: March 25th Via: Stan. Plot: A mobster travels to Hollywood to collect a debt, and discovers that the movie business is much the same as his current job. Rating: 6.8/10

First Viewing Viewing Date: March 24th Via: Apple TV+ Plot: Cherry drifts from college dropout to army medic in Iraq - anchored only by his true love, Emily. But after returning from the war with PTSD, his life spirals into drugs and crime as he struggles to find his place in the world. Rating: 6.9/10

First Viewing Viewing Date: March 24th Via: Disney+ Plot: Tasked with babysitting two children for the evening, Chris Parker receives a frantic phone call from her best friend needing to be rescued from Downtown Chicago. Taking the kids with her, the night spirals into a series of hair-raising adventures in the city. Rating: 7.3/10

Censorship

This is perhaps the most pertinent issue as we move forward and away from physical media: companies can control your digital content. Even if you buy movies and TV shows on digital providers, that sense of ownership is a complete fallacy as you're essentially paying for an extended lease that can be altered at any time without notice. I've mentioned before that movies can disappear at the drop of a hat, but movies and shows can also be altered and censored. One example is an episode of The Simpsons being pulled from circulation; it is no longer available on iTunes or Disney+. Even if you've purchased the complete season, or, hell, if you purchased the episode separately, it's now gone - deleted from the cloud forever. The only way to watch this episode is on your old DVD sets. There are other examples, like Splash - when it debuted on Disney+, the movie was digitally altered to cover a bare bum. There's talk of Disney removing scenes from their animated movies that might be too problematic, such as the "racist crows" in Dumbo. Hell, the versions of Star Wars on Disney+ are the most recent altered versions; you need to hang onto your VHS, Laserdisc or DVD copies of the original unaltered versions to keep those. The point is, going forward, scenes from movies might be deleted from the cloud forever, and you can bet that more TV episodes will be removed. Things can be digitally altered to cover nudity. I mean, a crew-member was briefly visible in an episode of The Mandalorian, and within a couple of days of the episode dropping, the person was digitally removed and the new master was streaming on Disney+. I know this is an example of fixing something for the better, but see how easy it is to change media and replace it forever? This is a big reason why I cherish my discs. Studios ain't gonna grab it from my hands and change it on me.

Viewed: Season 1

The Falcon and the Winter Soldier was my most highly-anticipated of the Disney+ Marvel shows, due to the terrific two leads as well as the return of the incredible Daniel Brühl as Baron Zemo, who gets more to do after his debut in Captain America: Civil War. The resulting six-episode debut season (a second season is still up in the air, given the announcement of Captain America 4) is very good for the most part, but falls short of perfection. Some of the niggling problems include incomplete character and story beats (the Sharon Carter angle is tragically underdone; she deserved more development and explication), a somewhat vague central narrative (apparently the original story involved germ warfare, but since the pandemic hit, it seemed in poor taste and was rewritten during the break in shooting), and the fact that the show is simultaneously too "woke" and not woke enough. Expounding upon the latter point, the show is determined to drive the narrative that America is a racist country and yada yada yada, right down to Isaiah Bradley calling Sam Wilson a race traitor if he decides to be Captain America, and a heavy-handed scene during which Sam is racially profiled by police. Such themes were no doubt beefed up during rewrites following the BLM stuff in 2020, which is going to provoke eye-rolls in some viewers while others are going to bemoan that it didn't go far enough in its condemnation of the United States. (Which is why you don't pander to such politics in the first place - try to please everyone, you please no-one.) An even bigger issue is that this stuff isn't even subtext; it's just text, lathered on with the subtlety of a shotgun - Sam's climactic speech is all over the place. I'd be very interested in seeing what the pre-pandemic drafts of the scripts looked like; they might've made for a more coherent series. But this aside, The Falcon and the Winter Soldier does more right than wrong. The ensemble cast is terrific, from the reliable Anthony Mackie who's an incredible protagonist, to Brühl continuing to impress as Zemo, and newcomers like Wyatt Russell and Erin Kellyman. The action scenes delight in every episode, with the scope of the set-pieces far exceeding what we're used to seeing on TV screens. Indeed, this is an expensive series which stands toe-to-toe with the theatrical movies. (I bailed after one episode of Agents of SHIELD; the cheapness killed it.) I liked seeing the real-world problems of these heroes, such as financial struggles, and the Isaiah Bradley storyline has big potential moving forward in the MCU. There are some powerful images, such as John Walker using the shield to brutally kill somebody in broad daylight, and Isaiah visiting the Captain America exhibit and seeing his story was extremely emotionally powerful. So overall, there's plenty of fun to be had with this show, and it hits the emotional beats that it needed to hit. But it does have problems.

First Viewing Viewing Date: March 24th Via: iTunes Store Plot: When Keith goes out with Amanda, the girl of his dreams, Amanda's ex-boyfriend plans to get back at Keith. Meanwhile, Keith's best friend, a tomboy named Watts, realizes she has feelings for Keith. Rating: 7.6/10

First Viewing Viewing Date: March 23rd Via: iTunes Store Plot: An outcast secretly pays the most popular girl in school one thousand dollars to pretend to be his girlfriend for a month in order to boost his popularity. Rating: 7.3/10