Thank God It's Wednesday

It's Friday. (Name that reference.)

My friends, we have survived yet another week of the Great Twitter Adventure! (Editor’s note: I am writing this sentence on Wednesday, November 16, so by the time you read this, the Great Twitter Adventure may have been closed because laying off tons of people is less of a big-brain, smart-guy move, and more of a no-brain, stupid-guy move.)

(Second editor’s note: I am writing this sentence on Friday, November 18, so may I just say: hahahahahahahahahahahahaha.)

Anyway, this is the part where I will point you to my post from Monday, also from this very newsletter.

Hello, Goodbye

Why the re-post? Well, right now, because of the upcoming holiday weekend and my upcoming trip to beautiful, sunny California (could I be visiting a theme park or three for one last time in 2022? Oh, who’s to say), the brackets are taking a little break. I’ll be back on November 28 with the 64-seed Disney Parks Live-Entertainment bracket. And as a reminder, each matchup will be right here on Substack. So if you want to vote — and I hope you do! — you’ll want to subscribe, for free.

As a general note, it is entirely possible some of you are new to the newsletter because of a non-Disney tweet I posted earlier this week. Specifically, this tweet:

Josh Spiegel @mousterpiece

Knives Out was the most fun I’d had in a movie theater since Paddington 2. Glass Onion is better than Knives Out.

If you’re here because of that tweet, welcome! I mostly talk about Disney here, but yes, Glass Onion is excellent, and you should be excited to see it.

One More Thing…

As always, this will be my spot to link to my latest work at other outlets (and to tease anything else I may or may not have seen and will write about it soon, too.)

• At the start of the week, I wrote a spoilery review/essay of Black Panther: Wakanda Forever, a film I very much wanted to love that sadly disappointed me. A noble effort, and I am always very happy to see Lupita Nyong’o on screen, but not a winner.

• I reviewed the penultimate episode of Andor over at Episodic Medium. It’s not quite as good as the prison storyline that just wrapped up, but still a solid installment leading into a season finale that I may or may not have already seen that I may or may not think is equally solid. Ahem.

• There’s a lot of new stuff on Disney+ this week, and one of the marquee titles is Disenchanted. One of these days, we’ll have to do an inside-baseball deep-dive into how baffling I find studio behavior to be when it regards charming and enjoyable films like this. I did not expect to like this, but guess what? I did! And I only got to say as much over the last day or so, which is strange to me. My review is here at Slashfilm.

• The reason I got to see Disenchanted slightly early is that I had the great pleasure to interview one of its stars, comedian/podcaster Griffin Newman, who voices Pip the chipmunk. If you’ve been following my work long enough to remember my Disney movie podcast Mousterpiece Cinema, you know Griffin’s a big Disney fan, a shrewdly intelligent animation aficionado himself, and a great interview. The interview is trimmed down from a robust hourlong chat we had, but I hope you check it out.

• One television show I have seen and will write about soon: Willow! Remember Willow? I know my good friend and former podcasting co-host Gabe Bucsko does, because he loves that 1988 film! I imagine he will enjoy the Disney+ sequel show. I…uh…did not. More to come in the days to come, but this show is a head-scratcher to me.

• Three films I saw this week that will result in writing soon enough: The Fabelmans (very good!), Glass Onion (one of my favorite films of the year), and Strange World (better than the decision to barely market the film would have you believe).