I’ll be honest: finally watching Deadpool & Wolverine when it showed up for free on Disney+ was something that I had been quasi-looking forward to for some time — I relatively like the other Deadpool movies, and who didn’t want an over-the-top self-aware Marvel roast at that time in the world? That feeling went away maybe inside 10 minutes, and what followed was one of the most exhausting, depressing movie experiences I’ve had in a long time, so much so that I switched off after an hour because I could only handle so much smugness in one sitting. (The second half of the movie felt less annoying than the first, but maybe I was simply in a better mood the next evening.)
The very next movie I watched was The Elephant 6 Recording Co., a documentary about the collective of bands in the 1990s that worshipped at the altar of Pet Sounds, Revolver, and 4-track recording only to become successful despite themselves. Watching a bunch of scruffy middle-aged nerds offer variations of, “We were just so into what we were doing, fuck knows why it got big” for 90 minutes proved weirdly healing after the glossy Marvel of it all. Anyway. Here’s what I watched in November.
