The Gaang is Back

Film: Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender
Format: Streaming video from Paramount on Fire!

Avatar: The Last Airbender is one of the greatest television shows ever made. I say this with no conditions or reservations. The show is smart, the characters are deep and believable. There are moments of great humor and moments of real tragedy, and it depicts a world in terrible conflict, with young kids at the center of it—kids who are essentially charged with solving that world-spanning conflict on their own. It is (my opinion) the best animated show in history, and without qualification, a show that I think everyone should watch. So I was very excited to see that Avatar Aang: The Last Airbender was a thing. I was also happy to see that it received just enough of a limited release for it to qualify for awards season.

It would be impossible to give a comprehensive look at the Avatar universe, but a quick primer will help with understanding the movie. In this world, there are essentially four nations, each one based on one of the four classic elements. Some people in each of those nations—the Fire Nation, the Water Tribes, the Air Nomads, and the Earth Kingdom—have the ability to “bend” those elements, something akin to performing magic with those elements. Overseeing all of this is the Avatar, an element bender who has the ability to learn all four elements and who is charged with maintaining balance. When each avatar dies, the spirit is reincarnated in the person of another bender, and the title rotates from someone in one nation to the next.

From the Future

Film: Arco
Format: Streaming video from Hulu on Fire!

As I say frequently, I try to go into everything I watch with a completely open mind. I want to like whatever it is I’m watching, but there are going to be times when, for one reason or another, I’m expecting something to be good or bad, not based on hype or the trailer, but some other reason. It might be the name of the film, or the cast, or a still. In the case of Arco, it was a still. Of all the Oscar films I was slated to watch from 2025, this is one that I really didn’t look forward to: I don’t like the art. For an animated film, that’s going to be hard to overcome.

Because of this, I went into Arco feeling like it had to prove itself to me more than the average movie does. That’s probably unfair, and it’s also pretty clear that I’m in the minority when it comes to the art style. I should also say at this point that, in a rarity for me, I watched the dubbed version of this. Typically, I watch with subtitles, but this bothers me a lot less with animation. Because of this, I’m not going to go through the typical casting—there’s a decent chance that the people I mention here won’t be the voices in the version you might watch.

Shark Week

Film: Dangerous Animals
Format: Streaming video from Kanopy on Fire!

I’m of two minds when it comes to dangerous animal movies. On the one hand, they are incredibly visceral. There’s something very lizard brain fearful about things like lions, grizzly bears, alligators, and sharks. Sharks might well be the most viscerally scary specifically because they live in a place where it feels like they can attack at any time. Of course, they don’t—shark attacks are incredibly rare. But it doesn’t change the fact that there is a gut level reaction to the idea of shark attacks. Ever since Jaws came out, people have tried to reinvent the shark movie, usually without much success. But Dangerous Animals feels like the first film in some time to really rise to the challenge seriously.

Don’t take this as me saying that Dangerous Animals is in the same class as Jaws, because it isn’t. To be fair, most movies aren’t—it’s not just one of the greatest rogue animal movies or horror movies in history, it’s one of the greatest movies ever made. Dangerous Animals, though, has a lot going for it. The reason is that, for a wonder, it doesn’t make the sharks the bad guys. The sharks here are just sharks acting like they do. The true evil is human, and honestly, this is exactly the right way to do this kind of movie.

Sounds Scary!

Film: Undertone
Format: Streaming video from HBO on gigantic television.

One of the issues that horror has as a genre is that what scares us is always going to be subjective. While there are certainly some visceral things that will get to a lot of people, some things work on us and other things don’t. Look at The Blair Witch Project, for instance. You can find horror fans who think it’s one of the worst horror movies ever made, and you’ll find others (like one of my brothers) who considers it one of the scariest movies in history. I bring this up because I get the sense that this kind of divergence of opinion will be the norm for Undertone (or undertone if you prefer the more stylized version of the title).

Before we launch into the movie itself, I want to talk about the aspect of this that needs to be discussed in some detail regardless of anyone’s actual opinion on the film. Undertone is an exercise in minimalism. While there is a full cast for this film, only a couple of actors appear on camera, with everyone else appearing only as voices through the phone or over the internet. Undertone was made for about half a million dollars, close to a shoestring these days, and while that’s obvious in retrospect, it’s not obvious while the movie is running.

What I've Caught Up With, June 2026 Part 2

I’m still watching The Sopranos as my workout show, and should be just about finished (but possibly not quite) by the end of July. I’m very close on finishing The Americans as well. On the MCU front, I rewatched The Defenders, which feels like a huge lost opportunity. I also watched The Inhumans, the easiest MCU show to skip and in which every single character is a miserable ass. I watched the last season of High Potential, which continues to be a great show, and also watched Hilda, which is great and should be watched by any kids interested in anything. Finally, I finished Gen V, and am now finishing The Boys so I can be done with that universe completely.

What I've Caught Up With, June 2026 Part 1

On pace for June for me is 33 movies, which is exactly how many I watched. I didn’t catch up at all, which still puts me at 7 movies off the pace for the goal for the year. Hitting the minimum goal is a good enough accomplishment for now, and July offers the opportunity to catch up. As seems to always happen, I was on pace to catch up a bunch and had a week where I watched almost nothing. If I can avoid those weeks, I’ll be on pace in no time.

Shearers Out

Film: The Sheep Detectives
Format: Streaming video from Amazon Prime on Fire!

When I first saw the poster for The Sheep Detectives, I figured it was an obvious miss. I liked Babe well enough, but talking animal movies aren’t really something I seek out, and there’s always a sense of CGI talking animals hitting that uncanny valley area that I find disturbing. And then the reviews started coming in and they were almost entirely positive. So when it showed up on streaming, I figured it was time to take a more serious look at it.

There are certainly some initial similarities to Babe, of course. It takes place on a farm, there are plenty of sheep, and all of the animals talk. But, The Sheep Detectives is a murder mystery, and it’s the sheep who need to try to figure out who killed their shepherd, because the local police are not specifically inept, but completely inexperienced in dealing with any serious crime like murder.