TV Shows Watched: Black Doves: S1E2 (Netflix) with audio description, Skeleton Crew: S1E3 (Disney Plus) with audio description, Shrinking: S2E9 (Apple Plus) with audio description, Cross: S1E4 (Amazon) with audio description, and Call me Ted: S1E4 (MAX) with audio description.
Podcasts: None
YouTube: I watched a few international films today without audio description, and did watch some videos of other critics talking about them. of the channels I remember, shoutouts to Deep Focus Lens, Spooky Astronauts, and Peter Bradshaw.
Movies: Better Man (Screener) WITH audio description, All We Imagine Is Light (Screener) no audio description, Red Rooms (screener) no audio description, and Bread and Roses (Apple Plus) no audio description.
Best Episode I Watched: Shrinking- I’m enjoying Season 2 even more, and this ensemble is really starting to gel even more. I’m more invested in characters that didn’t get much love the first season, and I really love the moments they’ve had around the potential adoption, as well as how far Sean has come.
Runner Up: Black Doves- Showed the origin (basically) of Keira Knightley’s character. A very solid episode.
Best Audio Description- Better Man- I never really dip into the movies, because they get their own reviews, but I had a screener that came with audio description which is so rare. The audio description was also excellent. Access Media I believe?
Runner Up: Skeleton Crew- It just really had a lot to describe. From the owl alien, to the escape sequence near the end.
Best Performance: Keira Knightley (Black Doves)- She’s still dealing with a lot, but this show is an excellent showcase of her talent. By showing her in the past and present, it presented different versions of her, and this is shaping up to be a great show.
Runner Up: Harrison Ford (Shrinking)- For that line “Do i have to answer the dumb ones?” Ford was built for this role.
Best Single Moment Of Audio Description: Technically, Better man, but I might be under a review embargo… but excellence.
Runner Up: Skeleton Crew- I really loved how they phrased the one droid as “the droid trying to rescue the prince”, which I might have paraphrased, as he stumbled around that droid shop behind Jude Law. It was a little moment, but it stood out and made me laugh.
Worst Episode: cross- Honestly, this show just isn’t working for me. I want a smarter Alex Cross. I miss Morgan Freeman.
Worst Performance: Ted Turner (Call me Ted)- Sometimes he says something just so deadpan, it’s hard to read any emotion at all. When he talks about being attracted to Jane Fonda, and explaining how that all started, it is so clunky. She’s terrific on her end, he could just as well be picking out paint at Home Depot.
Worst Audio Description: Now, I saw three international titles. I’d love to tie them, since none had audio description. All We Imagine Is Light is 100% unwatchable, with no English at all. Red Rooms is Canadian, and is about 90% French, 10% English, but still no audio description. Still, I got those in screener form. I watched Bread And Roses on Apple Plus,and that film is set in Afghanistan, and doesn’t even have an English dub, let alone audio description. A rare and total fail for Apple Plus, who usually knocks audio description out of the park. The only English I understood in the film was just this two word brand: “Fox News”. I think someone said Mother, but it wasn’t followed by more English, so I might have been mistaken. So, the winner for worst audio description is Apple Plus, for the lack of audio description on Bread and Roses.
