"Ibelin" and "Grand Theft Hamlet"

Machinima media is media that uses the existing digital assets and graphics engines of video games to create original animated works.  It's been around for a long time, with the popular "Red v. Blue" series still going after twenty years.  Two recent Machinima documentaries - or rather documentaries that use significant amounts of Machinima - have been getting some attention, so I want to take the opportunity to acknowledge a part of the cinema landscape I'm not very familiar with.  

"Ibelin," or "The Remarkable Life of Ibelin" in some markets, chronicles the life of a Norwegian man named Mats Steen, an avid gamer whose life was limited and cut short by a severe form of muscular dystrophy.  After his death, his family discovered his online life, based around the "World of Warcraft" online game, where he found friends and even love.  Director Benjamin Ree made one of my favorite recent documentaries, "The Painter and the Thief," and displays the same playfulness with the narrative here.  We jump backwards and forwards in time, and significant portions of the film are spent in-game with recreations of Steen's interactions, using the "World of Warcraft" graphics.  The graphics are pretty outdated looking, and the animation is nothing fancy, but they still get across the personalities of the people involved.

While there's a lot about "Ibelin" that feels piecemeal and cobbled together from secondhand accounts, it successfully makes its case that gamers can develop meaningful relationships in digital spaces.  And this was especially important for an individual who didn't have a chance to create those relationships otherwise.  Most of the events of "Ibelin" took place in the early 2010s, and gaming culture has changed considerably, but it's nice to have an optimistic look at how online gaming has the potential to make a positive impact on people's lives.  I was surprised at how much real emotion the filmmakers were able to evoke from scenes of fantasy RPG avatars just having conversations with each other.  

Because I'm not much of a gamer, part of me still thinks of modern video games as resembling "World of Warcraft."  So, I was completely knocked for a loop when I got a look at "Grand Theft Auto Online," the setting for "Grand Theft Hamlet."  This is a pandemic film, where a pair of UK actors, Sam Crane and Mark Oosterveen, are playing "Grand Theft Auto Online" during lockdown together, when they get the bright idea to stage a production of William Shakespeare's "Hamlet" in the virtual environment.  Sam's wife, filmmaker Pinny Grylls, documents the process of holding auditions, assembling a cast, trying to keep the rehearsal process on track, and finally holding the live performance.  It's not an easy venture, with so many amateur participants, and everyone tends to get killed a lot by griefers.                 

Though the emotional hooks aren't as strong as in "Ibelin," I still found "Grand Theft Hamlet" thoroughly watchable.  A big part of this is because the graphics of "Grand Theft Auto Online" are so much more cinematic than "World of Warcraft."  The gameplay takes place in a virtual recreation of neighborhoods in the Los Angeles area, with much more realistic and sophisticated graphics.  Crane and Oosterveen come up with their bright idea when they stumble across the game's version of The Hollywood Bowl - standing empty and ready for a performance.  Their version of "Hamlet" ends up being staged in multiple in-game locations, including rooftops, street corners, and even on a moving blimp.  The whole time, they're under threat of their avatars being shot by machine guns and blown up by rocket launchers.

As with "Ibelin," "Grand Theft Hamlet" often feels pieced together out of available footage and whatever limited recreations the filmmakers could manage on a minimal budget.  However, I like that the whole film, aside from a brief coda, takes place in the game.  We hear the players discussing their personal lives and real world complications, and a particularly poignant moment comes when we witness a marital heart-to-heart, but we never leave the "Grand Theft Auto Online" world.  A fascinating reveal late in the film, which I wish had been expanded on, is that one of the organizers is spending much more time on the project than anyone else because it's the only thing he has to focus on in lockdown.       

As for the "Hamlet" performance itself, we only get to see the highlight reel, but it's thrilling nonetheless.

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"Common Side Effects" and a "Harley Quinn" Check-In

"Common Side Effects" was co-created by Joseph Bennett and Steve Hely, and shares a lot of crew with the short-lived Max series "Scavengers' Reign."  "Common Side Effects," however, takes place in the present day and has a very different style and verve.  Our hero is an eco-warrior fungi expert named Marshall Cuso (Dave King), who discovers a Blue Angel mushroom in Peru that can cure all ills, and even revive the dying.  He's constantly on the run from the DEA, specifically Agent Harrington (Martha Kelly) and Agent Copano (Joseph Lee Anderson) for his possession of controlled substances, but makes his way back to the U.S. to try and cultivate the mushroom there.  He happens across his old high school crush, Frances (Emily Pendergast) and shares his discovery with her, unaware that she works for a pharmaceutical executive named Rick Kruger (Mike Judge). 

I've seen the show promoted as an adult thriller that is critical of the pharmaceutical industry, but it's actually much lighter and stranger than it seems at first glance.  "Common Side Effects" features an interesting mix of conspiracy theory what-if, ensemble comedy, and trippy tall tale.  There are certainly exciting developments as everyone fights for control of the Blue Angel, and more than a few resort to violence.  However, this is a show where death is awfully impermanent, and the big emotional throughline comes down to Marshall and Frances figuring out how to be friends again as they deal with all the chaos that they inadvertently cause with the mushroom.  Yes, there are environmental and anti-Capitalist messages in the story, but our hero is also a rotund hippie who spends a lot of time getting into and out of ridiculous situations, so the primary goal here is definitely to amuse and entertain.  Also, there are the wonderfully trippy hallucination sequences that happen whenever anybody eats a Blue Angel, which could only happen in animation.  

A note about the visuals, while we're on the subject.  The look of "Common SIde Effects" is very distinct, because all the characters have oversized heads, and oddly proportioned faces, so they all look a little bug-eyed and weird at first.  The characters include an interesting variety of types - law enforcement, business opportunists, scientists, Marshall's community of mycology oddballs, and related allies.  Nearly everyone is sympathetic and relatable to some degree,  but most have pretty skewed priorities, and react to the existence of the mushroom in foolhardy ways.  Even Marshall, who wants to use the mushroom to cure the world, repeatedly puts his trust in people he shouldn't be trusting.  However, he's also not the only good guy we meet, and I really enjoyed watching a couple of characters figure things out and end up on the right side of the fight in the end.  Also, gotta love that Peruvian flute theme.

And now, a quick check-in with Max's "Harley Quinn" series, which recently finished its fifth season.  Because we have a new "Superman" movie coming out, corporate synergy likely decreed that there should be a season of the show set in Metropolis.  Harley and Ivy use the excuse that they've thoroughly screwed up Gotham City to the point where they don't have much else to do, and move to the unnervingly perfect Metropolis, where even Superman (Clark Kent) is feeling obsolete because of how well the city is running.  New adversaries this season include Lena Luthor (Aisha Taylor) and Brainiac (Stephen Fry), with more attention on characters like Lois Lane (Natalie Morales) and King Shark's son Shaun (Kimberly Brooks).

Any show getting five seasons is an achievement these days, but "Harley Quinn" isn't in very good shape this year.  A lot of the original roster of regulars has moved on, and there just aren't compelling stakes to their adventures anymore, even though the show's stakes have always been pretty low.  We meet Ivy's ex and get into Harley's family troubles a bit, and both of the major villains this year are pretty good.  However, it's clear that our leading ladies are never going to break up and don't face any threats that are beyond their ability to handle, so there's not much excitement to be had.  It's not a bad watch as a hangout show, but way too many of the characters are now the kids or relatives of other characters, and the creators have apparently exhausted the supply of obscure comic book characters they can dredge out of the DC archives.  It may be time to let Harley and friends have one last hurrah, and bow out.  

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"Presence" and "Love Me"

Director Steven Soderbergh and screenwriter David Koepp are collaborating again, this time for a movie told from the POV of a ghost.  It's a tiny production, filmed entirely in a suburban house, with each scene comprising a single long take.  Like the recent "Nickel Boys," the whole film is shot from a first person perspective.  Despite what the marketing might lead you to believe, this is not a traditional horror film.  It's about a ghost, but a ghost who has to figure out its own identity and why it's trapped in this house, watching over the lives of a typical family of four.  

For most of "Presence," events play out like a non-supernatural domestic drama.  Rebekah (Lucy Liu) and Chris (Chris Sullivan) move into the house  with their teenage children, Chloe (Callina Liang) and Tyler (Eddy Maday).  The family dynamics are difficult.  Chloe is mourning the loss of a friend.  Rebekah is unsympathetic, heavily favoring her son Tyler, who is an insensitive jock.  Chris is more empathetic, but often frustrated in his attempts to communicate with his wife and children.  Tyler becomes friends with a boy named Ryan (West Mulholland), who becomes close with Chloe.  All five of them start experiencing strange phenomena in the house as the ghost becomes more active.

"Presence" feels like the kind of experimental low-budget movie that a couple of promising first-time filmmakers would make.  It's got a few big twists and some awkward dialogue that don't quite come off as well as I was hoping they would, and the first person camera takes some getting used to, especially when it starts whip-panning in some of the later scenes.  Like many of Soderbergh's recent films, it feels like he's mostly interested in playing with the cinematic visual language - specifically the use of certain camera techniques and the first person perspective.  Not all of these experiments have been very watchable or entertaining, but I thought that everything paid off in "Presence," especially the ending.  And I really appreciate seeing Lucy Liu in a relatively straight dramatic film role for once.  I really wish it happened more often.  

On to "Love Me," which I'd been keeping an eye out for since it premiered at last year's Sundance Film Festival. Brothers Andy and Sam Zuchero have made a romantic comedy about two AI - a weather buoy and a satellite - who gradually gain sentience after humanity goes extinct, and eventually develop a relationship with each other.  It's extremely high concept, very experimental, and I don't think most of it works.  However, it makes for a fascinating thinkpiece and I enjoyed watching the film come up with different ways to portray the different stages of Me (Kristen Stewart) and Iam (Steven Yeun) becoming more and more anthropomorphized over the passing aeons.   

The biggest problem with "Love Me" is that it jumps into the romance before it establishes who Me and Iam are as characters, and blunders a lot of the character development.  It also relies on tropes and meta commentary very heavily, and the fact that the film is self-aware about this doesn't help much.  Me, the buoy, who eventually self-identifies as a girl, is initially the pursuer.  She creates a fake persona for herself by borrowing heavily from the social media of a real couple, Deja and Liam.  Her idea of being in a relationship is copying what she likes.  This means endlessly acting out scenes from existing videos, repeating other people's words and actions.  The message about performative online interactions couldn't be plainer.  It takes some significant conflicts and self-discovery to get our two AI on the right track.

The visuals shift from screenlife text messaging and search engine results to virtual world animated avatars, to finally the live actors interacting physically in the last act.  Frankly, none of it looks very good, but the attempt to piece all this together coherently is admirable in and of itself.  I also do not believe Kristen Stewart and Steven Yeun have any screen chemistry together at all, which may have been the point.  In any case, this is a weird little movie, but innovative and earnestly trying new things, and the filmmakers deserve nothing but encouragement in their future endeavors.  

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"The Pitt," Year One

A prestige streaming series with a fifteen episode season?  How can this be?  The new Max medical drama looks like "ER" at first glance, and apparently was originally conceived of as a sequel series until rights issues quashed it.  Showrunner R. Scott Gemmill, executive producer John Wells, and star Noah Wyle are all "ER" alums.  However, "The Pitt" is a different beast.  For one thing, it takes place in real time, like "24," with each episode covering an hour of a marathon shift at the Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Hospital ER, from 7:00 AM all the way until 10:00 PM.

Much has been said about how much more realistic "The Pitt" is than other medical shows.  We get to hear curse words!  Sensitive body parts and medical gore are uncensored!  I can't attest to the accuracy of the medical procedures being performed.  However, it is nice to see a much more realistically diverse group of doctors, nurses, and social workers, plus acknowledgement of long wait times, administrative pressures, and the still lingering trauma of the COVID pandemic.  "The Pitt" is not a documentary, and there's plenty of played-up drama. Nobody is wearing a surgical mask.  Morally and emotionally difficult situations seem to arise every few minutes.  The writers tackle every current hot-button issue affecting medical practice, from abortion to anti-vaxxers.  However, I appreciate that the focus stays on the medicine.  We stay in and around the hospital the whole way through, and whatever information we learn about the characters we learn in the course of their day at work.  No flashbacks or cutaways are deployed.

There are a lot of characters to keep track of - Dr. Michael "Robby" Robinavitch (Wyle) is the senior attending physician, and the man in charge of the doctors.  Under him are the senior residents, Dr. Collins (Tracy Ifeachor) and Dr. Langdon (Patrick Ball), and residents Dr. Mohan (Supriya Ganesh), and Dr. McKay (Fiona Dourif).  New to the hospital and working their first shift are a newly transferred resident, Dr. King (Taylor Dearden), an intern, Dr. Santos (Isa Briones), and a pair of medical students, Whitaker (Gerran Howell) and Javadi (Shabana Azeez).  Nurses are sparse in the cast, because of the focus on the doctors, but the most important are the ER's charge nurse Dana Evans (Katherine LaNasa) and everyone's secret crush, Mateo (Jalen Thomas Brooks).  And just when you think you have everyone sorted out, the night shift starts showing up, led by Dr. Abbott (Shawn Hatosy).

The real-time storytelling format is a big plus, because it allows stories to unfold in a more realistic way from episode to episode.  We see the ER workers dealing with cases that are ongoing from previous shifts, and eventually have to hand off their work to others.  Some situations drag on over multiple hours, including a patient named Doug (Drew Powell) who is stuck in the waiting room.  You can spot him in episode after episode, his frustrations building as the hours pass.  There's also an emphasis on how so much of the doctors' work is complicated by other issues - language barriers, patient combativeness, cultural differences, and thorny domestic situations.  One patient may be a trafficking victim.  Another may be plotting something terrible.  Kiara (Krystel V. McNeil), the department social worker, frequently has to be called on.  

Watching The Pitt's newbies learning how to navigate this world is the main driver of the show's excellent character drama.  Noah Wyle's great as Dr. Robby, trying to stave off emotional and spiritual exhaustion as he struggles to lead during one of the worst shifts of his career.  However, I was far more invested in Drs. Javadi, Whitaker, Santos, and King.  Part of the fun of "The Pitt" is the competence porn, where we're watching smart, capable, dedicated people doing good work.  However, at the same time it's about watching people at major inflection points in their lives and careers - learning, maturing, and facing new challenges with every new patient.  Everyone loves Dr. King, who is hinted to be on the spectrum, and blossoms quickly as she gains more confidence under pressure.  However, it's also fascinating to chart the progress of overconfident, pain-in-the-ass Dr. Santos, who shows up with a slew of bad impulses and a troublemaking streak.

All the teaching and learning does mean that the writing sometimes gets awfully didactic.  All the characters are fallible, but they do get self-righteous at times without much pushback.  My biggest criticism of the show is that it allows the doctors to get away with some very risky behavior without enough consequences.  There's some self-awareness of this, especially with Santos's and Langdon's storylines, and all the really touchy subject matter is generally handled well, but I think the show could do better.  

Frankly, I like "The Pitt" so much that I'm really excited that it has the opportunity to do better.  For the few things that rub me the wrong way, there are so many more that delight me.  You don't see many shows this dense with new characters and new information, week after week.  The cinematography and editing do a great job of showing more than you'd expect without showing too much.  There's no backing score and all the music is diegetic.  And there are gossipping Filipino nurses!  

 

Fifteen hours were over too quick.  Pay off Crichton and get the next season into production ASAP.  

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The Time Machine

The Internet Archive went through a rough patch recently, and I'm glad that it's back on its feet.  The site is a repository for so much media that doesn't seem to exist anywhere else.  It's also the closest thing I've found to a real time machine.  

A while ago I stumbled across the Internet Archive's trove of picture books - not just the classics like "Curious George" and "Goodnight Moon" that everyone knows, but all the junk books and ephemera that cluttered our bookshelves and got lost under the bed when I was a kid in the '80s.  I'm talking about the movie tie-ins, the McDonalds give-aways, and the read-along books that came with cassettes or records.  Those were the flimsy, cheap, bottom of the barrel books that somehow stuck around much longer than some of my favorites, even though they were so disposable.  An awful lot of them have been preserved in the Internet Archive, right along with all the classics.  And I'm so glad that they're there.  

I spent so much of my childhood around books that now nothing unlocks my old memories like books.  I got obsessed with finding some of the old 80s and 90s children's media I'd enjoyed as a kid when my kids hit certain milestones - mostly for my benefit rather than theirs.  Looking in on those old pieces of my childhood through the Internet Archive was instantly transporting.  I could feel some of the old synapses firing to life again, the sense memories of dog-eared pages and crayon-scrawled covers returning full force.  I remembered the toys those books were often mixed together with, the carpets and furniture of my childhood home, and the sounds of my parents telling me "five more minutes" or "time to clean up."  It was a shock to see the whole, unblemished versions of volumes like "Over in the Meadow" that I only remember as a half-mangled collection of damaged pages, barely held together by peeling sticky-tape.   Or a "Sesame Street" dictionary where the endpages weren't covered in Smurfs stickers and temporary tattoos.  

It was also fun to suddenly have access to all the books I didn't have as a kid.  I think everybody had at least one book that was part of a series that they were never able to find the rest of.  Sometimes the other volumes were pictured on the back cover or on an insert, to let us know they existed.  I remember loving Graeme Base's "Eleventh Hour" and "Animalia," and wishing I could find his newer books.  And suddenly, there was his entire bibliography, along with all the obscure, out-of-print Dr. Seuss books, the books Roald Dahl had written for grown-ups, and the whole Disney Fun-to-Read library.  I found out that "Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs" had two sequels.   "Babar" has six more books written by the original author, and over thirty more by his son.  And part of me felt like I was seven years old again, and the luckiest kid in the world. 

I understand that every generation has its own media, and have done my best to encourage my kids to explore everything available to them, but it does unsettle me that so few of the books I loved as a kid are available in libraries or bookstores anymore - and, if they are they've been repackaged or re-illustrated, or rewritten to appeal to the current crop of tots.  I can only seem to find the adventures of a younger, more attractive Mrs. Piggle Wiggle, or graphic novel versions of The Babysitters Club books at the local library.  Of course, that happened generations before me, and will happen generations after.  It took some work to find the exact version of "The Little Engine That Could" that I remembered on my bookshelf, which had different illustrations than the original.  Other books I had turned out to be abridged versions or updated classroom versions.  A couple had content so outdated that they're no longer kid-appropriate.    

 

I'm glad that time marches on, and my kids get to enjoy their Mo Willems and Dav Pilkey, but also that I can read them the Bill Peet and Louis Slobodkin books that aren't so easy to find copies of anymore.  I get some reassurance that the books that existed when I was little have been preserved somewhere, and I can visit them once in a while.  It's not the same as having the physical books in your hands, but for me it's enough.   

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Can't Take a "Joker"

Well, "Joker: Folie à Deux" is not the blockbuster that Warner Brothers was hoping for.  And it's certainly not the film that the fans of  the Joker character were hoping for either.  Todd Phillips, by all accounts, was given carte blanche with the sequel to the surprisingly successful 2019 "Joker" movie, and he made a movie that will only be of interest to a very, very few.  I'm honestly not sure whether or not it's a good movie, but as one of the few people who actually seems to be in the target audience for "Joker: Folie à Deux," I admit that I came away entertained.  However, I completely understand why most viewers were appalled and the studio is treating this as a complete disaster.

Since the first "Joker" was an homage to the early films of Martin Scorsese, and "Joker: Folie à Deux" was rumored to be a musical, I prepped for it by rewatching "New York, New York," and Francis Ford Coppola's "One From the Heart."  "Joker: Folie à Deux," despite Phillips' protestations, is definitely a musical film, but the one I find myself comparing it to is "Pennies From Heaven," the tragic Depression-era anti-musical that juxtaposes its heroes' increasingly miserable lives with elaborate fantasy musical numbers.    "Joker: Folie à Deux" does something similar, taking place mostly in Arkham State Hospital, where Arthur Fleck (Joaquin Phoenix) has been locked up, awaiting trial for the murders he committed in "Joker."  After he connects with a fellow patient, Lee Quinzel (Lady Gaga), in a music class, he starts imagining himself in musical numbers set to oldies and show tunes.  Yes, Anthony Newley and Leslie Bricusse's "The Joker" is on the soundtrack.  

The common criticism I've seen of "Joker: Folie à Deux" is that it's determined not to be a crowd-pleaser on any level, and I don't disagree.  The movie actively undercuts the notion that Arthur Fleck is any kind of heroic figure, so the fans who saw him as a pro-anarchy icon in "Joker" get no satisfaction.  Nearly all the violence in the film is directed against him, with no opportunity for reprisal.  The courtroom drama is farcical and devolves into nonsense.  The romance is promising, but comes up pretty half-baked.  Despite the involvement of Lady Gaga, the musical numbers aren't up the standard of your typical song-and-dance picture.  The raw style and Joaquin Phoenix's shaky vocals match the tone of the piece, but none if it's very memorable.  Plus, there are a couple of fake-outs that seem deliberately positioned to frustrate the audience even further.  

It's admirable that Todd Fields has committed to such a starkly bleak vision for this character, and used Warners' money and resources to do it, but my trouble with the film is that the execution is so lacking.  While the film looks gorgeous and expensive, "Joker: Folie à Deux" is badly paced, with a second act that drags interminably.  The scripting is repetitive, disjointed, and dwells on the unpleasantness.  For the first hour or so, I was keeping an open mind as the love story was being set up, and the first few musical numbers were introduced.  However, the movie is not good at actually being a romance or a musical, and wastes the talents of so many talented people.  Lady Gaga is earnestly striving to distinguish her version of Harley Quinn, but gets little of interest to actually do.  Brendan Gleeson plays a guard who is Arthur's primary tormeter in Arkham, and Catherine Keener is his lawyer - both doing their best with pretty empty roles.  As for Joaquin Phoenix, who won an Oscar for playing Arthur Fleck - well, the singing and dancing is new, but the misguided romance and the mental unwinding isn't.  

I'm very happy that Phillips took such a big swing with "Joker: Folie à Deux," even if it didn't turn out the way that anyone wanted.  I think that he could have gone much harder on the spectacle and violence, and darker on the themes and relationships.  I'm glad that there was no attempt whatsoever to make this more related to the Batman universe, but at the same time Philips has also given up on the Scorsese pastiche, which leaves his movie stylistically adrift.  There are a few individual sequences that I enjoyed, and the use of old standards like "That's Entertainment!" and opening with a Sylvain Chomet  animated sequence are points in its favor, but "Joker: Folie à Deux" never seems to find its footing.  Even the ending feels less like a shocker than just putting the movie out of its misery.  

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The "Cinematrix" Fix

My new favorite web based movie themed online game is Cinematrix, currently presented by Vulture.com, but which appears to have originated at MovieGrid.io.  The gameplay is simple.  Every day you get a nine-square grid, with one axis listing three actors or directors, and the other axis listing three descriptors for movies like "1995-2004," "Academy Award Nominee" or "co-starring Will Ferrell."  Your job is to fill in all the squares with movie titles.  If you're especially ambitious, you can try and fill in the most obscure matching films that you can, because the game keeps track of the most common and the rarest answers, and will score you accordingly.  

I'm not very good at Cinematrix, and only manage to fill out the entire grid about half the time.  The most difficult part of the game is that it allows no mistakes - you only have nine guesses.  I have an especially tough time staying within date ranges.  However, I consistently score in the top 30% of players anyway, which suggests that the average Cinematrix player is similarly prone to the same kind of mistakes I make.  However, that's what keeps the game fun for me.  I like to think that I'm pretty knowledgeable about movies, but I'm definitely more interested in some kinds of movies than others. 

It's very clear where the limits of my movie knowledge are, trying to remember a Richard Gere movie with "A Title Starting with I or J," or any movie starring Julia Roberts that came out after 2010.  I'm usually so focused on directors that I have real trouble keeping character actors straight.  I regularly mix up Regina King and Regina Hall, Jon Bernthal and Joe Manganiello, and I'm still not entirely convinced that Mary Stuart Masterson and Mary-Louise Parker are different actresses.  Cinematrix does one of those little post-game stats reviews at the end of each game, so you can see where you rank, the hardest squares to fill based on how many players got them right, and the most obscure correct titles that people managed to come up with.  I think I've only gotten one of the most obscure titles once, which really helps to keep my movie nerd ego in check.

I have a few things on my side, however.  My secret weapon is animated films, which often have large casts and multiple sequels.  I might not remember the efforts of Adam Sandler and his regular crew in many live action movies, but they were in three "Hotel Transylvania" movies together.  Cameos and narration jobs count, including all those dubs of Ghibli movies with star-studded casts.  I'm also an avid Academy Awards watcher, and Oscar-related categories come up pretty frequently.  An awful lot of popular films count as Oscar-nominated when you look at categories like Best Visual Effects, Best Sound Editing, and the ever nutty Best Song categories.

Most of the other movie-related web games I was playing a few years ago after the Wordle boom have slipped out of my regular rotation.  I don't know if I'll play Cinematrix for much longer.  But for now, I look forward to a new grid every day, along with NYT's Connections and the occasional round of Wridges.  I like that Cinematrix offers a lot of variety and the categories can get very challenging - one of the Thanksgiving categories wanted movie titles that included the names of NFL teams - so I'm definitely not bored yet.  And I like that I'm getting some entertainment value out of my hopeless movie nerdery.

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