What’s Up 2020: Week 18

Welcome to the next What’s Up! Week 18 was a rather slower one, kind of. Like I had said before, it was also a week of immense stress and lots of overtime so in turn, a lot of things suffered from it. Luckily, next week’s recap returns to normal so we’ll be all back on track with everything (hopefully)!

READING

Currently reading: Undead Ultra

Very little reading was done! My main reading material has been catching up with news mostly for work purposes. Suffice to say, not enough progress in Undead Ultra to say much more about it. I am rather frustrating for not finding more reading time though.

PLAYING

• Samsara Room

Currently playing: Pinball FX3

Last week had the release of Samsara Room, which is a remake of Rusty Lake’s first game. It was offered for free on Steam and mobile devices which is always great. The game itself is very much to Rusty Lake’s style of puzzles/escape room. It was a fun little game with some decent puzzles for sure. I’m working on some mobile games roundup posts for Game Warp currently so this might get on one after I finish up the current post. There’s some gaming reviews backlog but things are slowly getting back up and running.

On the other hand, I finally started Pinball FX 3 which is one that’s been recommended to me by my podcast co-host Elwood after I had been on the pinball craze with Demon’s Tilt previously.

WATCHING

• Escape Room (2017)
• The Edge of Seventeen (2016 rewatch, Review)

Currently watching: Fight Club (1999)

Movies was on a low. i watched a bad movie to start the week and that was 2017’s Escape Room. Don’t confuse it with the more recent Escape Room that I reviewed HERE. Very different experience. It was so bad that I couldn’t use it as my feature film so I ended up rewatching a sure-fire, The Edge of Seventeen. Its been a few years since I’ve seen this one and it still is really fun to watch.

Much to a lot of people’s surprise, I haven’t seen Fight Club and was doing it for Movies and Tea recording. Way ahead in recording so you can guess what our next season is pretty much about at this point. I got shocked by the movie’s length and lost the focus to watch so about half done and stopped.

BINGING

• Unrequited Love (2019 rewatch)
• Wolf Creek (Season 2, 2017)

Currently binging: Youth With You 2, Me To Us, The Love Equations, Produce Camp 2020, Welcome Back to Sound, Go Fridge (Season 6), Yes I Do (Season 2)

TV is still going the strongest. After The Untamed, I’m not going to lie, its not done yet. I’m still incredibly obsessed with it so I haven’t found the mood to start a whole lot of new TV dramas. There’s one that just started that I want to see but just not in the mood at this current moment. Either way, variety shows have been bursting out everywhere. New seasons for shows that I like. Everything in the “currently binging” section is all new shows updated once or twice a week so once I caught up with everything, I went back to rewatch Unrequited Love which I am also working on a TV binge for and a second watch has got me scratching my head even more why they are remaking this so soon. Either way, we will see whether the new one works as well when it gets released.

As for Shudder, it finally got Wolf Creek’s Season 2 which we’ve been waiting for since we finished the first season a year (or maybe two) ago. Luckily, this is an anthology series so every season the story is different because the first season is slightly foggy (more for my husband). This one was very different to the first season but overall, other than the first episode, it was a pretty good one. I’m not sure whether Season 3 was confirmed but I did see in my research that Wolf Creek 3 is in the plans.

The only changes for this week for currently binging goes to the newest season release for Go Fridge and Yes I Do on Tencent and iQiyi respectively.  There are some changes to the structure but overall, it seems like its going to be a good time.  Only one episode in so we never know, right?

That’s it for this What’s Up!
What have you been reading/watching/playing/binging?

Double Feature: A Stork’s Journey (2017) & The Edge of Seventeen (2016)

As I work through maintaining a little bit of everything every single week, here we are with the double feature of the week showcasing a free movie for a limited time on Google Play Store called A Stork’s Journey and 2016’s teenage coming of age favorite, The Edge of Seventeen. Going into both of these is completely fresh, for one, I just saw Storks and this is A Stork’s Journey, a movie I know nothing about, while on the other hand,  I don’t know much about The Edge of Seventeen, but Hailee Steinfeld has yet to convince me that she is a young actress to watch out for. Maybe this will be the one to do it.

Let’s check it out!

A Stork’s Journey (2017)

Director: Toby Genkel & Reza Memari

Voice Cast: Drake Bell, iJustine, Jane Lynch

Even though everybody else thinks he’s a sparrow – Richard himself holds tight to the conviction that he is in fact a stork. – IMDB

A Stork’s Journey is a pretty generic story. While there is some fun acting and some cool use of characters and play with words as well as incorporating the modern terms, it still has moments where it does fall flat a little. What does it give an edge is perhaps Jane Lynch doing the voice of Olga, the Pygmy Owl. This is definitely a rag-tag aviary team as Richard sets off to prove that he is a stork by making it to Africa, and on the way meeting other birds which are different in their own way to their own type of bird, be it an oversized pygmy owl or an over the top parakeet that wants to be a singing star and the great amount of techie pigeons that divulge a lot of information. A Stork’s Journey is a simple and innocent journey that pretty much tells us to dream big and never downsize ourselves. We can be whatever we want to be but also accept that we are who we are, big or small, and have our purpose and excellence. Absolutely a family-friendly film and probably geared towards a younger audience.

I mean, I probably wouldn’t pay to see this but it was free on Google Play Store and might still be, if you know, then do leave a comment below. I can’t see the price because I own it now. Its a tad cliche as a bird adventure story which might remind you a little of Rio at parts, but the story that move along fast enough and the animation has some adorable bits and I personally love Jane Lynch and her voice for Olga was really cool. There are some clever word plays and I like those in anything. I’m kind of in the middle here. Its not exact a hit but not exactly a  miss either.

The Edge of Seventeen (2016)

Director (and writer): Kelly Fremon Craig

Cast: Hailee Steinfeld, Haley Lu Richardson, Blake Jenner, Hayden Szeto, Woody Harrelson, Kyra Sedgwick

High-school life gets even more unbearable for Nadine when her best friend, Krista, starts dating her older brother. – IMDB

At this point, I’ve watched The Edge of Seventeen once and then rewatched it two more times. I’ve seen The Edge of Seventeen be compared to Sixteen Candles and in some ways, I can see it particularly with an awkward main character who loathes the idea of high school and is really over it. Suffice to say that I like this one a whole lot. Part of it is that the story is written so well with enough awkward dialogue and awesome characters that really highlight the melodrama of being in high school. For Nadine (Hailee Steinfeld), this means losing her only friend to her popular and hot (almost perfect) brother who already has everything and takes away her only spark of joy as well. Call this a blessing in disguise, while Nadine flips out in her odd ways and makes some stupid decisions (as you would expect), she ends up meeting Erwin (Hayden Szeto), a fellow classmate who reaches out to her unexpectedly in her time of need.

The Edge of Seventeen is full of great characters. I’d have to say that the highlight is the equally awkward Erwin, played by Hayden Szeto. He took portrayed his awkwardness with silly joke and the dialogue between him and Hailee Steinfeld’s Nadine was a lot of fun. All their scenes were quite fun and meaningful. On the other hand, the scenes with Hailee Steinfeld and Woody Harrelson was also really great as its mostly pretty hilarious with his unexpected brutal honesty. Woody Harrelson’s Mr. Bruner is somewhat of a odd support system, his straight forward answers or comments on her situation spoke a lot of the harsh truth and in many ways, as someone that is past the high school phase, it reminds me of why someone didn’t point those things out.

Honestly, its been a while that I’ve seen something so fun with coming of age elements and kind of at a point really tugged at my heartstrings. I’m starting to see that potential in Hailee Steinfeld although, I do believe the fantastic script and the great cast all around made this memorable. I totally recommend this movie!

Have you seen A Stork’s Journey and/or The Edge of Seventeen?

(Sorry for the later than expected post. I thought I had posted this up. Apparently, I forgot to schedule it…)