What I've Caught Up With, December 2022

I didn't watch much in December in general aside from television. I finished a rewatch of Burn Notice (highly recommened) and M*A*S*H (which mostly holds up). I also finished watching The X Files, which was good, but hard to get through in terms of the last few seasons. That being the case, there isn't a lot to put here, but I'm confident that will change for the coming year.

What I’ve Caught Up With, December 2022:
Film: Dead Presidents (1995)

I walked into Dead Presidents expecting something along the lines of Boyz N the Hood, but this is not that. It takes us 90 minutes to get to the heist that on the surface seems to be at the center of the film. Anthony (Larenz Tate) ends up in the Vietnam War, and when he gets home, his friends are addicted or wounded and jobs are thin on the ground. Out of work and desperate for money, trying to keep his girlfriend from seeing other men, he and some comrades decide to rob an armored car filled with unmarked bills. This is a lot deeper, a lot smarter, and a lot darker than I was expecting, and it’s a better movie than I was prepared for.

Film: The X Files: I Want to Believe (2008)

I’m very slowly trying to catch up on a lot of past television shows that I missed. The X Files was one of those, and it took me months to get through—I finally finished on the last day of the year. The second movie, The X Files: I Want to Believe, fits in with the series at the end of the ninth season. It is, essentially, a long episode of the show, and rather than put in the work of figuring out how to get Mulder out of the results of the last episode of the ninth season, it’s all just handwaved away. This would have been a fine two-part episode, but as a movie, it left a lot to be desired.