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gamerswift13 · 11 months

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Mrs Maisel Musings!

Kia ora, friends!

Alright, here it is folks, the moment maybe some, maybe none of you have been waiting for: my thoughts on the The Marvellous Mrs Maisel final season. I did it, I finally got it done. I think the reason it took me so long, aside from previously mentioned mental health issues, is that writing stuff like this for five hundred and sixteen minutes of television is hard! It’s really hard. I would love to hear what you all think of this, and if you want to discuss what I’ve written here, or even just about the show or season in general, please hit me up! I would love to talk about it with you.

Now enough with the delays and the stalling - please enjoy my review (??) of The Marvellous Mrs Maisel season 5, the final season.

So, I really liked the first few seasons of The Marvellous Mrs Maisel. Even though it’s a bit cheesy and dopey at times. Rachel Brosnahan is a joy to watch on-screen, and a lot of the other actors here do a really great job with the script they were given... such as it is. On a recent rewatch, though, I started to see the strings a little bit - things that I liked the first time around just didn’t quite hit the same. I got through most of it, all the important parts, and then I started the new season. It’s been a couple weeks or so since I finished it, and I’m not as down on it now as I was when I started, but y’all, I am about to have some opinions.

This the final Mrs Maisel season really feels like creator Amy Sherman-Palladino probably wanted to do at least one more season after this, but someone at Jeff’s Website Studios said no, so she simply decided to burn the show to the ground.

Now as I wrote in the subtitle, I am about to spoil things here, so this is your final warning: if you don’t want to be spoiled for season five of The Marvellous Mrs Maisel, get out now.

Also: foul language ahead! 🤬

The entire point of this season seems to be leaning into how much of a piece of shit Miriam Weissman is. We get glimpses of her in “current day” 1962 juxtaposed with scenes set in 1972 and 1982, and a couple of other random years, where we skip around and see all sorts of wild stuff - Midge is rich and famous, her kids Ethan and Esther are all grown up, Joel is in prison, and there are some bonkers and hilariously bad facial prosthetics.

Now, aside from the hilariously stupid idea that Midge as a stand-up comic somehow got insanely rich, there are some cool ideas here. The first episode opens with Esther in a psychiatrists office in 1981, searching through a backpack for something and seeming very annoyed. On first watch, I didn’t like that this is something that’s shown at all, but the more I thought about it the more I warmed to the idea. In previous seasons, The Marvellous Mrs Maisel has at times made a point of showing Midge being a terrible and/or absent mother, usually for comedic effect, but I think it’s interesting that they took this idea and bore it out, to show that mid-20’s Midge’s actions had consequences. In a later episode we also see Ethan as an adult, with Midge annoyingly landing in a helicopter nearby and upsetting everyone - this wasn’t as interesting to me, but it was still a good glimpse into how little regard Midge appears to have for anyone but herself, Joel, Susie, or Lenny Bruce.

Speaking of Lenny Bruce, I want to talk about his appearances in the final season. If you know anything about him from real life, you might know how his life ended, and where. The very first episode of season five has Midge bumping into him randomly at the airport when he is about to board a plane to Los Angeles. This made me so. Fucking. Mad. IRL Lenny Bruce was found dead in his home in Hollywood Hills in 1966, which lead me to believe that the very last time Midge will ever see him was this scene at the airport. Midge walks away from the interaction with Lenny with a strange look on her face, as if she somehow knows that this will be the last time she ever sees him alive, and it is my humble opinion that that fucking sucks. Lenny Bruce is one of the best characters on this show, with a ton of great appearances and lines and jokes, and Luke Kirby does a phenomenal job of capturing the real Lenny’s energy - it’s not 1:1, but it’s a great depiction, and I simply cannot believe Amy S-P would do my boy like this. The only other time we see Lenny in this season is years later, performing in front of a fairly disinterested crowd as he mumbles and rambles about this thing and that, and it’s so fucking depressing. This season, the show never outright mentions his drug use, but it’s heavily implied, and there’s a moment in a back room where he is talking to Susie and appears to be unable to stand up. On the one hand, I’m kind of pleased that they didn’t depict his death at all, but it really bothered me that these two scenes were all we got of him before the show stops referencing him at all.

The part of this season that really shines the most to me is a scene from episode eight, with Abe in a dimly-lit restaurant with Gabe, his boss, and a couple of colleagues. The scene begins with Abe checking his coat and coming over to sit where Gabe etcetera are already seated around a table and chatting. They order some wine. There’s a cut here to a few minutes later where the wine has arrived and been poured, and Abe sits silently, swirling his drink and clearly deep in thought while the others talk amongst themselves. Eventually, Gabe interrupts Abe’s thoughts, telling him that he had been raving to the others about his conversational skills. Abe apologises. “It’s just… the whole goddamn world, you know,” he says, clearly depressed about something. “Only that?” chimes in one of the other men at the table. Then ensues a conversation about the state of the world, about progress, about gender inequality and mental health, even, which was surprising to me. This scene is heartbreaking, and might be some of the best writing in the entire series. I cried watching this scene the first time around, and again just now rewatching it. It’s really sad that Abe never got the kind of character development shown here earlier, I would have liked to see that.

Episode six is an interesting sort of experiment; beginning with Midge on stage, in 1985, talking about her relationship with Susie, it then transitions into a roast for an indifferent and grumpy Susie in 1990, which is basically a device for a bunch of famous people you’ve seen in other things to come together as characters never seen before or again and tell stories about Susie’s rise to fame as one of the biggest talent managers in the United States. Here we get an explanation for why Joel is in prison, and a bunch of seemingly randomly selected stories about what Susie has been up to since 1962. As with the portrayal of Esther in episode one, this was another thing about this season that really bothered me at first, because it felt like it lacks focus, but as I thought about it more, it started to grow on me. This collection of tales about Susie’s exploits make sense for her character, and help to define who she is.

Overall, this season really fell down for me when I realised that a lot of really interesting moments never truly pay off. We jump around a lot between different years and perspectives, and we see a lot of things that could have been great story arcs, but they simply end and are never mentioned again. I really do feel like this season was supposed to be two or more, and Jeff’s Studio said no, so Amy Sherman-Palladino lit it all on fire. I think that if hyou like this show, it might still be worth it to catch the final season, but personally I feel like it should never have been made - at least not in this form. I would much rather have seen this stretched out more, over at least one more season. It tries to give the viewer some closure in the very last scene of the very last episode, but for me it falls flat. I don’t think I’ll ever watch this again.

Thanks so much for reading! What did you think? Once again, please feel free to hit me up in the comments, on the socials, or send me an email. And as always, if you want to read more stuff by me, you can check out my Letterboxd reviews - I recently reviewed The Craft (1996), Eradication (2022), and The Sand (2015)!

I hope y’all are staying safe out there! Have a great week and I’ll talk to you again soon. Ka kite anō au i a koe. 💚

Rebecca

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gamerswift13 · 10 months

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Speak Now (Taylor's Version)!

Hey!

So some of you will know this, others may not, but Taylor Swift recently re-recorded her 2010 album titled Speak Now, and it was released roughly 40 hours ago at the time of posting. When ‘Speak Now (Taylor’s Version)’ was announced back in the first week of May this year, I wrote a thing about how I feel about the original album. If you haven’t read that, you may want to to get caught up on how and why I feel things so deeply for this record in particular.

Since way back in February 2021, when Taylor first announced that she was re-recording a bunch of her old albums, starting with Fearless, I have been waiting for this moment. I won’t get into the whole sordid story about why she’s doing it, or how much I wish Scoote* B*aun would get hit by a car, but it’s a whole thing. What I will say is that in the long run, I am honestly happy that this happened because the re-recordings are flawless. Seriously, I’m just wonderstruck (lmao 😉). I haven’t listened to this record as much as I wanted to before writing this - I’ve listened a few times, but mostly I’ve just been thinking about it. I was b i g excited for this to come out, but I can’t lie, there was some anxiety too - this record is so important to me so it had to be flawless; and I think Taylor nailed it. Anyway, I have waited for this for a long time, and now that it’s finally here I have Some Thoughts.

I went back and forth in my head about how to do this, and I decided the best way would be to nail down exactly which songs I was most nervous or excited about, and then do a broader breakdown of the rest of the album, so here we go: starting with…

Mine

‘She is the best thing that’s ever been mine.’

Taylor always opens her records with one of the strongest tracks on said record, and this one is no different. I adore the original, and the re-recording is incredibly faithful to it. The only differences I noticed in this track versus the original were a few unsubtle moments where the growth and refinement of Taylor’s vocal range in the past thirteen years really shine through. It’s the same song, but new again.

Sparks Fly

‘The way you move is like a full-on rain storm, and I’m a house of cards,’

This song has always been one of my all-time favourites from any artist ever, and this new version is just as intense and moving as the original was back when I first heard it somewhere around 2012. This re-recording gives me chills. I am literally trying not to cry right now as I sit here writing this and relistening to it. Every line in this song is flawless. And oh my god, the strings. During the track, I find it difficult with my audio processing problems to tell if it’s a guitar, a violin, another string instrument, or all of the above, but whatever it is it makes this song so much more powerful.

Speak Now

“She floats down the aisle like a pageant queen,”

‘Speak Now (Taylor’s Version)’ is the first track here where Taylor’s strengthened and refined voice is apparent in almost every lyric. While it’s maybe not one of the biggest or strongest stand-out tracks on the record, but it has a very special place in my heart from when the original record made its indelible mark on me. Not a lot is different here, besides the sound of Taylor’s voice, and I think that’s okay.

Mean

“You, with your switching sides and your wildfire lies and your humiliation.”

Mean is so much fun, it always has been. The up-tempo of it contrasted against the subject matter has always worked really well for me. The opening is so peppy while she talks about how hard critics had been treating her, and how badly she used to take it when it happened. But I love how the song goes from ‘upset’ to ‘f**k you’ by the end. This re-recording feels really good, too, because the line “some day I’ll be big enough so you can’t hit me,” feels like both a prophecy from 2010, and a vindication in 2023 that she was right all along.

Better Than Revenge

“He was a moth to the flame, she was holding the matches.”

This is the one I was most anxious about going into this new version. For one, I really love the original song, despite its one glaringly large problem, but I was also nervous about whether or not she would change the lyric, and if so, to what? The first time I heard the new lyric, I was reading the prologue in the booklet that came with the CD hard copy of the album, and even though I wasn’t super paying attention I noticed it. I skipped back a few seconds to hear it again, and looked up the lyrics in the booklet so I could sing along and get it into my brain. I really like the new lyric a lot, and I expect I am going to think about it a lot in the future, too.

Haunted

“Something keeps me holding onto nothing.”

Haunted has always been a big favourite of mine to just scream-sing along to when I need to release some sadness energy, even the acoustic version is great. This version is… something else. It’s always been something of a rock song, but I feel like Taylor really leaned into that here, and the result is flawless. I sent Castles Crumbling to my sister (not a swiftie) during my first listen to the record, and she liked it so much that she listened to the rest of the album - during her listen, she sent me back this text:

This new version is incredible, and I’m so happy to have it in my life. And I’m stoked that ‘Haunted (Taylor’s Version)’ may have made a Swiftie out of my sister. 😁

Ours

“The stakes are high, the water's rough, but this love is ours,”

I love the way Taylor kept the little southern drawl from the original track here. This is the one track on this record that really makes my heart flutter. There’s very little in this track that feels different from the original, but I think that was a really inspired choice because it was honestly practically flawless the first time around. This song also has a really special place in my heart because the original video was the source of one of my favourite reaction gifs to use on social media or in texts (see below!).

Wrapping up… 🎁

The rest of the re-recorded tracks here are gorgeous, and you really can hear the different inflections and tones in Taylor’s voice as she sings these classics from her early career in the studio again. Altogether, I love this release of Speak Now and I really feel like if someone were to ask me which version they should listen to, my answer would be overwhelmingly this one; it truly is the definitive version of the record. It was honestly tough to nail this list down to just seven favourites out of the 22 tracks, even with excluding the From The Vault tracks which I will get to in a second. I’m so happy to have this space to gush about this record, and I really hope you enjoyed reading about my feelings!

From The Vault 🔓

As I said above, I excluded the From The Vault tracks from my list because I simply don’t have a ton to say about them yet. I have only listened to them a handful of times, so expect a follow-up post in a few weeks, once I’ve had more time to sit with them and form Some Opinions. What I will say right now, though, is that the immediate stand-outs for me were Electric Touch, I Can See You, and Castles Crumbling. I’m excited to listen to them a bunch more times. I also wanted to mention the Surprise Announcement video at the end of the album on Apple Music, too. Many hardcore swifties will probably have seen a version of it before elsewhere, but I had not - I have been avoiding any streams from The Eras Tour in hopes that I’ll someday get to see a complete version on Netflix or something - and y’all, this video almost broke me. I so wish I could have been there in person to feel the energy of the crowd!

The End 🔚

Well that’s it from me for this week, friends. Thanks so much for hanging out and indulging me while I am once again back on my Taylor Swift bullshit. If you want to see more writing from me, as I mentioned above you can go back and read about why Speak Now is so special to me, check out other things I've written on Substack, and as always you can check out my Letterboxd movie reviews. I recently reviewed Single White Female (1992) and Poseidon (2006)! Also! Please remember that if you have comments, questions, suggestions, or just want to say hi, please hit me up in the comments or at any of the socials in the links below.

Stay safe out there y’all and have a great week. You’re the best thing that’s ever been mine! Ka kite anō au i a koe. 💚

Rebecca

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gamerswift13 · 10 months

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Need for Speed Unbound!

Or as I like to call it, High-speed Head-on Collision Simulator 2022

Kia ora, friends!

This is gonna just be a short one this week due to ongoing mental and physical health issues, but on that front I have some news: I think I’m slowly but surely getting better!

But anyway, I wanted to talk a little bit about Need for Speed Unbound this week because I have been playing it a lot over the last few weeks (when I have had the energy) and I can’t think of a game in recent history that has made me rage quit and want to throw my controller so many times but still is able to pull me back in. I love a good arcade racer; my favourite series in this genre is obviously Forza Horizon (and to a lesser extent Forza Motorsport, which I am still excited for in October), but I have been known to dip into Need for Speed now and then. This latest entry, launched last year, recently came to Xbox Game Pass, so I decided to check it out.

My first dive into this game was via Xbox Cloud Gaming and y’all, that service is great for some games, but for a game as fast-paced as Need for Speed Unbound, I absolutely do not recommend it 😅. Playing it this way, I was constantly crashing into things that I didn’t see because the frames fell out, so it didn’t take long for me to decide to make some space on the tiny Xbox Series S internal storage and download the game to play locally. Once I got that out of the way, I started to have a blast… for a while. My TV, which was 1080p, died a couple of months ago, so since then I’ve been using a TV I borrowed from my sister, which is 720p, and let me tell you, again for a game like this, it’s… a less than optimal way to play. Once I started getting into faster and faster cars, I started crashing into things again. A lot. This isn’t a failure of the game itself, I don’t think, I’m just playing it in a really stupid way 😭.

Apart from all the technical stuff I just mentioned, Need for Speed Unbound is really fun. I think my favourite part, though, has been customising my character, as well as the paint/wraps on some of my cars.

I wish I had more pictures of the different outfits I’ve had my character wear, (I haven’t had the time to go back to the game before writing) but I still really like this look. And oh boy do I love that car. It’s one of the cars the game gives you in the beginning, a Nissan GT-R from I want to say 1997 (or thereabouts), and it’s fast, great at drifting, extremely hot, but the best thing of all: I made it look queer and non-conforming as fuck.

The game limits what you can write on your cars, I assume because it’s possible other players could see it, so it wouldn’t let me write ‘queer’ or ‘gay’ or ‘bitch’ or ‘fascist’ - those first two are kind of bonkers considering the amount of queer representation this game contains, but I digress. So I substituted ‘fascist’ with the succinct ‘fash’, and instead of ‘basic bitch’ I wrote ‘basic beach’, which the latter is honestly kind of better anyway.

The racing is fun, though frustrating sometimes thanks to the game only giving you a maximum of retries per in-game 24-hour period, but what really stands out to me is that there is so much queer representation here - like way more than I’d have ever expected from a Need for Speed. There’s one NPC racer you meet and race against named Justicia who is from Mexico and is openly transfem. There are signs around the city that say things like ‘love is love’, or simply have the pride flag on them. And as you may have noticed on my car in the pictures above, you can just put the pride flag and trans flag all over your car if you want - and not just that, they have every single type of pride flag I could think of, which blew me away. Seriously, more games need to be this open about supporting queer communities. There’s also a bunch of representation for people all over the world - the music in Need for Speed Unbound includes tracks in Arabic, Japanese, Spanish, French, and a few I couldn’t nail down just by listening, and it’s honestly super refreshing.

Anyway, that’s all from me this week. Sorry if it feels a bit like it was put together at the last minute because, well, it was, but I wanted to make sure I had something for you.

Thanks so much for reading, y’all, I appreciate it. As always, if you have any comments or questions, hit me up on the social links at the bottom of the page, or flick me an email! If you want to read more stuff from me, you can check out my Letterboxd reviews! This week I reviewed Robot Jox (1989), which I believe may have inspired some of the aesthetics of things like Neon Genesis Evangelion and Pacific Rim.

Stay safe and warm out there (or safe and cool, if you’re in the northern hemisphere!) y’all, and I’ll talk to you all again really soon. Ka kite anō au i a koe. 💚

Rebecca

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gamerswift13 · 11 months

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Writing a story about myself!

Kia ora, friends!

I want to preface this by apologising to anyone who might have been expecting regular posts - it turns out its kind of a lot of work to remake these posts in a way that fits and makes sense on Tumblr! I'm hoping this might get easier when Tumblr moves to ActivityPub, but I guess we will see. So in the meantime, cross-posts here might be a bit spotty, depending on the type of content and how much of it there is, But I haven't forgottem about you!!

Now, on with the show...

On Friday just gone, my anxiety was doing a big ol’ spike after I had an interview for a course I am hoping to get into (more on that in a later update - if I get in, that is), so when the plumbers and electrician showed up to fix some stuff, I pretended to not be home. This was pretty dumb because those things really do need fixing, but now they won’t get done til at least the day you’re reading this, but my brain said no and I wasn’t about to disagree. Long-story-short, when I was getting ready to go to the supermarket and the plumbers were still packing up their gear to leave, when I had an idea - I should write something about this. So I did.

Not all the details of this story are totally accurate to what actually happened - I only wish I had had the energy to shout at the people who were partially the source of my anxiety, but alas, I did not. But a lot of this is true. I’ve had a couple of passes at this now too, so hopefully it comes off as at least a little polished compared to what it looked like a couple of days ago when I first sat down to write. I’ve got a couple other things to talk about today, but before I get to those, here’s ‘A Story About Myself’…

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Seeing if Fara wanted a shallot (she did but only to fight)

Rebecca awoke at about 11am to the sound of someone knocking on their front door. They fucking hated it when people did that – no text, no call, just shows up at their door. They stayed quiet for a few moments, waiting to see if the random stranger outside would knock again. They didn’t, so Rebecca relaxed a little bit. They could hear two or maybe three men outside the door, working with tools and such. “What the fuck are they doing?” Rebecca whispered to themselves. Several minutes later, there was another knock. “For fuck sake…” again, Rebecca waited to see if another knock would come. It didn’t. Rebecca wasn’t sure how to proceed, they last thing they wanted was to alert these strangers to their presence, but they also didn’t want to spend however long the men outside would be there, hiding in bed, so they got up and went to feed Fara, the cat.

Rebecca then proceeded to spend the next few hours, while the men outside were doing whatever they were doing, playing video games, and talking to Fara whenever she came into the bedroom to graze on her biscuits. A few times they would get up and sneak a glance out the front windows to see the vehicle these strange men had arrived in, and one time they saw the blue lettering down the side of a white van – plumbers. “God damnit,” Rebecca muttered under their breath, “I forgot they were coming.” Rebecca had planned to make their house a little less hostile to anyone that wasn’t them but had instead just completely forgotten about it. So instead of doing the normal, reasonable-brain thing and inviting the plumbers inside and simply apologising for the mess, Rebecca’s anxieties, practically all of them, spiked, and all they could do was hope and pray that the men outside would simply vanish soon, and then they could give the plumbers a call on Monday to sort it all out.

Several hours went by, until finally, they couldn’t take it anymore. They had to leave the house. The plumbers were still outside, but there was no sign of when they might leave. So, Rebecca got dressed, put on their Bluetooth headphones, and opened the front door. They stepped out and almost immediately ran directly into one of the plumbers. “We’ve been trying to-“ he started when Rebecca looked at him and blurted out “I’ve got covid!” Rebecca then promptly stormed off toward the street while the plumber stood there, not sure what to make of what just happened. Another plumber was coming around the corner, “Hey, are y-“ “Covid!” Rebecca shouted, without looking or slowing down. The second plumber also left dumbstruck, looked at the first one who looked to him and just shook his head, shrugging.

Rebecca did not, in fact, have covid. It was just the first thing their stressed brain could think of to say to get these strange men who were giving her so much anxiety. All of the anxiety. It wasn’t their best ad lib, but it did the trick.

The plumbers were, finally, gone when Rebecca got home again. They fumbled for the front door key in the dim glow of the sensor light, unlocked the door, and stepped through. Once inside, their cat Fara greeted them with a soft little meow, curled up on Rebecca’s warmest coat draped over a chair – if was Fara’s current favourite place to sleep. “Hewwo darling,” Rebecca smiled. Fara smiled back. “Awh you hungwy?” Rebecca asked, rhetorically, Fara was always hungry. At the sound of those words Fara stood slowly and stretched herself out. “Aww big stretch!” Rebecca gave Fara a little chin scratch and then went to the cupboard for the cat biscuits and wet food pouches. It had been a process, finding the exactly right food that Fara would consistently eat, but once Rebecca had finally figured it out, there was no way they would attempt to change it up. Fara was the fussiest little bitch they had ever met. But she was so pretty.

Rebecca didn’t know what kind of cat Fara was; likely just a mixed breed, a tabby, but she had the biggest, fattest, fuzziest little tail they had ever seen. It was like a raccoon’s tail; it was so bushy. And Fara’s fur was super soft. Fara had adopted Rebecca a few months after they moved into their current house. One day Fara just started showing up and watching Rebecca from the fence, so Rebecca decided to try feeding her. It wasn’t long before Fara started showing up nearly every day and expecting food, and then not long after that that she was showing up every day and staying over most nights. It was at that point that Rebecca had decided this cat probably needed a name. They settled on Fara Sherazi, the name of a character from a TV show they liked, and it took no time at all for Fara to begin recognising and responding to the name.

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I hope you liked this! This was an interesting excercise for me because even though I have been using they/them pronouns for coming up almost four years now, I’ve never tried to write a story with a central character who is non-binary against a cast of other characters with no names or real identities like this - I hope it wasn’t too confusing! I got a little confused myself when trying to decide if I should use a pronoun or just repeat my character name instead for clarity haha. This is definitely something I want to work on more though, and if you have any specific feedback about it I would love to hear from you!

Before I let you go, I want to let you all know that I have finished The Marvellous Mrs Maisel now and that piece I’ve been teasing about is almost ready - it will most likely be the drop for next Monday unless I finish it sooner, but it might surprise you to know that I’m leaning a little less hard on it as I was in the beginning. I’m still not happy, but I’m not going to be quite as mean as I originally intended.

And one last thing; I mentioned a little while back that I am planning on doing a bit of streaming on Twitch, and I am still working on that, but it’s taking a little longer than I’d have liked to get into a good routine because of some health problems. I haven’t forgotten! It’s just taking a bit longer. And speaking of things that are taking a bit longer: my Tabitha serial story is still on the way, but I think I was just a bit over ambitious about what I could potentially commit to - it’s coming, but it might not be until around the end of the year at this point, so I’m sorry if you are excited for that! You’ll just have to wait a wee while longer for that to start.

As always, thank you so much for reading! I really appreciate it. If you like what I do here, please consider telling a friend, or sharing a post you liked on social media! I don’t do advertising of any kind except yelling about it on my social medias when I remember, so for me to grow I need your help! Any comments, questions, suggestions, leave them in the comments or hit me up on the aforementioned socials (links at the bottom of the page)!

Have a great week everyone, I’ll talk to you again soon. Ka kite anō au i a koe. 💚

- Rebecca

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