Nearly a year ago, I started a blog post documenting all the media I’ve consumed or will consume doing lockdown. After more than a year of lockdown, I received my vaccination on 9 April 2021 and this Friday will mark the end of the 2 week period I’m supposed wait to maximize my vaccine efficacy. My metric for when I’d stop caring so much when the pandemic was over was basically when I could get the vaccine. Since I’m young and do not have anything that would allow to me qualify for a tier to get me vaccinated earlier, getting the vaccine would mean anybody could get the vaccine. If I contracted COVID and vaccines are not readily available, and spread it to someone who died as a result, I think I would have acted morally irresponsible if I didn’t act in accordance to my municipality’s orders. However now, everyone will have vaccines and if someone gets sick and die from choosing to not get it, that’s on them, not on me. In the following months, I’ll expect that I’ll start behaving more like COVID is similar to the flu.

With confinement coming to a close, I figured that I’d do a review of all the stuff I saw and listened to.

Movies

I saw 122 movies during confinement. Most of them pretty good, if not entertaining. Some standout movies I saw were Incendies, Denial, Phoenix, The King’s Speech, The Fool, Tel Aviv on Fire. All of these were great to watch and often times phenomenal in so many ways.

Incendies is a fantastic movie that almost works like a detective movie in a way. The children of a deceased mother investigate her past by retracing her steps to reveal the mystery of her life. As light is shed on her past, you get to experience an amazing story as the story gets put together by her children.

Denial is a great courtroom drama focusing on the trial of David Irving a prolific Holocaust denier. Really interesting subject matter and made me buy the book by the expert witness from that trial debunking all of Irving’s claims (I have yet to read it).

Phoenix is a great concept of a movie. A woman returns to her German hometown after The Holocaust, but she received facial reconstructive surgery burns she suffered. She is not recognizable as her past self, including to her husband who believes her dead. The movie tackles of a lot of ideas of self image, perception, and identity and does so in an interesting fashion while still being entertaining for a guy like me who will have blatant ideas go over my head.

The King’s Speech is fantastic movie looking at a particular disability, namely stuttering. I don’t know if I’ve seen a movie tackle a disability as frankly and responsibly until I saw this movie. Biden has talked quite openly about his own stutter and reading and listening about what Biden went through and seeing it mirrored in the movie was really cool.

The Fool is another movie with a fantastic concept and with great execution. A man finds out that a building is so structurally unsound that it will collapse in the next 24 hours. He now has to try and convince the local, corrupt Russian government to acknowledge its mistake and evacuate the building.

Tel Aviv on Fire is a pretty funny comedy. Despite not knowing the languages spoke in the movie, I found the scenarios very funny, entertaining and well written.

Shows

I got really burnt out on watching shows after watching The Sopranos, which is excellent (though not as good as The Wire and anybody telling you otherwise is wrong) so I didn’t see too many after finishing it up. I did see Narcos, Making a Murderer and The Deuce which were all excellent. I still have a huge backlog of shows I need to watch including and not limited to Breaking Bad, Better Call Saul, Big Little Lies, Westworld, Mr.Robot, Nathan For You, Oz, Atlanta, The Last Dance, Dark, Unorthodox, Curb Your Enthusiasm, It’s Always Sunny In Philadelphia, Fargo, and Patriot. I didn’t really make a dent in my show backlog, but committing myself to watching 5 seasons worth of content really isn’t appealing to me at the moment.

Miniseries

Having now watched a fair amount of miniseries, I am now convinced that miniseries may be the best form of visual media out there to tell a story. They aren’t time constrained like movies are and you can properly flesh out whatever you want from the story, and they don’t get trapped in any kind of fomulaic show format as easily. They are easy to watch and, unlike shows, you don’t have to commit to watching 4 seasons of content to get a fully rounded story. I’ve watched some amazing realistic stories or dramatized stories based off of real events such as Chernobyl, Band of Brothers and Generation Kill. I’ve watch cool and cute animations such as Ping Pong Animation and Love, Death & Robots. I’ve watched comedies such as I Think You Should Leave With Tim Robinson and The Goes Wrong Show. I got to see the great documentary miniseries The Jinx, but most of all I got to discover one my favorite pieces of media, The Plot Against America. I still think about the scene where the mom is her old neighbor’s kid. It was a phenomenal miniseries, plus it’s only 6 episodes!

Music

I’m not really that into music compared to other medias. I want to to be so I’m trying to expand my musical tastes and horizons as much as possible and to listen to as many things as I can. I mostly started listening to music as a way to keep up with my french, but now I’m trying to actually develop musical tastes so I can enjoy a new medium and connect with people on a new interest to the fullest extent. I’ve listened to a lot of stuff over confinement, though I think mostly in the second half, I actively started listening to different and new albums I had access to. I don’t have the vocabulary to describe what I like or what I find interesting. I generally like jazzy sounding songs and trip hop genres and I have started listening some post-rock songs. I listened to 103 different albums during confinement. This year was definitely the most I’ve listened in my entire life which I’m sure will be reflected on my last.fm profile.